Gwendolyn Brooks: American poet & teacher
Gwendolyn Brooks: Childhood Gwendolyn Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas. Shortly after her birth, her family moved to Chicago, Illinois, where her father was a janitor and her mother was a schoolteacher and classically trained pianist. Gwendolyn’s parents encouraged their daughter’s passion of reading and writing. Gwendolyn was a published writer at the age of thirteen when her poem, “Eventide”, appeared in American Childhood. Her success continued and by the time she was seventeen years old, her poems were published frequently in the Chicago Defender, which was a newspaper for the black population of Chicago. She attended in Hyde Park High School which is the leading high school in the city, an all black school Wendell Phillips and finished at integrated Englewood High School. Later she graduated from Wilson Junior College.
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Love & inspiration Poetry shaped most of her childhood and after being published for the first time, she met James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes and encouraged to keep writing and to read modern poetry. In 1938, she married Henry Blakely and the two moved to the South Side of Chicago. They had two children together, Henry Jr., and Nora. She did not slow down writing though. Her first book was published in 1945, A street in Bronzeville, which brought her front and center and she was named one of the “Ten Young Women of the Year�, wont her first Guggenheim Fellowship and became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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The turning point: Activism In 1967, Gwendolyn attended the Fisk University Second Black Writers’ Conference and made the decision that she wanted to become actively involved in the Black Arts movement which did not go unnoticed. She was noted as being the most face of movement. Because of her activeness in the movement, there came a big shift away from major publishing houses to smaller ones. Gwendolyn became known as a protest poet. She wrote about characters from the nation’s black neighborhoods and sometimes made her readers uncomfortable because she simply put the facts out there. She recorded the impact of city life but never blamed the city for what happened to them. Today she is remembered as making an attempt to help inner-city children find the “poetry” in their everyday lives. Gwendolyn passed away on December 3rd, 2000.
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Honors & legacy
1946, Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry
1946, American Academy of Arts & Letters Award
1950, Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
1968, appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois, a position she held until her death in 2000
1976, the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America
1985, selected as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, an honorary one-year position whose title was renamed the next year to Poet Laureate
1988, inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame
1989, awarded the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement by thePoetry Society of America
1992, awarded the Aiken Taylor Award by the Sewanee Review
1994, chosen as the National Endowment for the Humanities' Jefferson Lecturer, one of the highest honors in American literature and the highest award in the humanities given by the federal government.
1994, Recipient of the National Book Foundations's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
1995, presented with the National Medal of Arts
1995, honored as the first Woman of the Year chosen by the Harvard Black Men's Forum
1995, received the Chicago History Museum "Making History Award" for Distinction in Literature
1997, awarded the Order of Lincoln award from The Lincoln Academy of Illinois, the highest honor granted by the State of Illinois[14]
Brooks also received more than 75 honorary degrees from colleges and universities worldwide.