Poet gwendolyn brooks biography

David and Keziah encouraged their children’s reading habits. Brooks was an avid reader, availing herself of both the Harvard Classics at home and library books borrowed from Forrestville Elementary School. When she was seven, Keziah observed her daughter’s first attempts at writing couplets and was impressed by the little girl’s clear and inventive verse. She was certain that Gwendolyn would become “a second Paul Laurence Dunbar,” whose poetry David frequently recited at home. Two years later, Brooks was writing quatrains. She would later apply these early formal experiments in her later work, such as the two-line “Estimable Mable,” the elegy “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till,” and her best-known poem, “We Real Cool.”

Despite their modest origins and David’s meager wages as, first, a janitor, then a shipping clerk at McKinley Music Company, David and Keziah provided their two children with a comfortable home and pleasant childhoods, encouraging

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Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka on June 7, 1917, to David Anderson Brooks, the son of a runaway slave, and Keziah Corinne (née Wims), and raised in Chicago. Brooks began writing poetry in her teenage years and published her first poem in American Childhood magazine. She sent her early poems to both Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson, and both elder poets responded with letters of encouragement. Brooks also became a regular contributor to the Chicago Defender’s “Lights and Shadows” poetry column when she was sixteen. She graduated from Woodrow Wilson Junior College in 1936. 

Brooks was the author of more than twenty books of poetry, including  Children Coming Home (The David Co., 1991); Blacks (The David Co., 1987); To Disembark (Third World Press, 1981); The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems (The David Co., 1986); Family Pictures (Broadside Press, 1970); Riot (Br

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Gwendolyn Brooks

American writer (1917–2000)

Gwendolyn Brooks
Commemorative postage stamp issued by the USPS in 2012
Born	Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks (1917-06-07)June 7, 1917 Topeka, Kansas, U.S.
Died	December 3, 2000(2000-12-03) (aged 83) Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Occupation	Poet
Education	Kennedy-King College
Period	1930–2000
Notable works	A Street in Bronzeville, Annie Allen, Winnie
Notable awards	Pulitzer Prize for Poetry(1950) Robert Frost Medal(1989) National Medal of Arts(1995)
Spouse	Henry Lowington Blakely, Jr. ​ ​ (m. 1939; died 1996)​
Children	2, including Nora Brooks Blakely

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks (June 7, 1917 – December 3, 2000) was an American poet, author, and teacher. Her work often dealt with the personal celebrations and struggles of ordinary people in her community. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry on May 1, 1950, for Annie Allen,