Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry, poverty, and a Pulitzer prize

What Brooks taught the world about the beauty of community and being a black woman in America

Gwendolyn Brooks is an earthy, plainspoken, unpretentious American legend. She won countless awards including a Pulitzer prize and is known around the globe as Chicago’s First Lady of Poetry. She is a big deal. But more valuable than that, she was a teacher who shared her love of poetry with anyone — especially any child — who asked. 

Let’s learn more about what made this poet so extraordinary. 

A young poet

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born on June 7, 1917 in Topeka, Kansas. At just six weeks old, her mother Keziah, who was a school teacher, and her father, David, who was a janitor and aspiring doctor moved the family to Chicago. They settled in Chicago’s South Side, in what is now known as the Black Metropolis–Bronzeville Historic District. 

The following year, Gwendolyn’s younger brother Raymond was born. Both children had a strong relationship with their parents. Brooks said her father would often sing to them and her mother would play the piano. Art was greatly encouraged in the Brooks house. Her parents nurtured the creativity that she and her brother expressed at early ages —  Gwendolyn with writing and Raymond with painting.

Brooks started writing when she was seven years old. She said it was her parents who encouraged her the most, as there just wasn’t an interest in creative writing in schools at the time.

Brooks ended up publishing her first poem at age 13. The poem was called “Eventide” and it was published in a popular kids magazine called American Childhood. 

By age 16, she had written more than 70 poems. 

Her mother pushed Brooks to share her work with well-known writers. At one of his speaking events, Langston Hughes, world famous poet and father of the Harlem Renaissance, read some of her work. He said, “You’re talented, keep writing, someday you’ll have a book published.” Brooks said that was all the encouragement she needed as a teenager.

She said, “I knew I would just write and keep writing as long as I was here.”

She was so inspired that she kept in touch with Hughes, often exchanging letters and poetry. Hughes had great love and respect for Brooks, helping her get published, recommending her work for awards, and even writing a column about her first book in the Chicago Defender. 

Bronzeville and beyond

Brooks graduated from Wilson Junior College in 1936 and then went on to work for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

It was at the NAACP where she met her husband, Henry Blakely. He, too, was an aspiring writer. They were married in September of 1939.

Brooks said in her autobiography that poetry wasn’t everything and that parties were a big part of her early life in Bronzeville.

“My husband and I knew writers, knew painters, knew pianists and dancers and actresses, knew photographers galore. There were always weekend parties to be attended, where we merry Bronzevillians could find each other and earnestly philosophize sometimes on into the dawn, over martinis and Scotch and coffee, and an ample buffet. Of course, in that time, it was believed, still, that the society could be prettied, quieted, cradled, sweetened, if only people talked enough, glared at each other yearningly enough, waited enough.”

Life started changing fast for Brooks. In 1940, she gave birth to her first child, her son Henry Blakely III. A year later, she started participating in local poetry workshops.

In 1944, two of her poems were published in Poetry magazine, which was a goal of hers since she was a teenager.

In 1945, she published her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville. It was like a love letter to her beloved neighbor. The book received great reviews from literary critics and became a cataly