Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born June 7, 1917 in Topeka Kansas and raised in Chicago. She was the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Gwendolyn Brooks is the author of more than twenty books of poems including Blacks and Children Coming Home. She discovered her gift for writing at a young age and when she was just 13 years-old her first poem was published in a children's magazine. At age 16 she had already created a portfolio of writings that included nearly 75 published poems. A year later when she turned 17 years-old she began submitting her work to the Chicago Defender newspaper poetry column.
In 1943, Brooks won her first major poetry award at the Midwestern Writer's Conference and two years later her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, was published by Harper and Row. Brooks also received a Guggenheim Fellowship which is awarded through a competition to individuals who previously demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts. Gwendolyn Brooks was on a roll! She was named one of the "10 Young Women of the Year" for 1945 by Mademoiselle Magazine and in 1950 her second book of poems, Annie Allen, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and Poetry Magazine's Eunice Tietjens Prize.
In 1962, Brooks was invited by President John F. Kennedy to read at the Library of Congress poetry festival. After that experience, she began teaching creative writing at various colleges. She wrote a book-length poem called In the Mecca, about a mother searching for her lost child in a Chicago housing project, which was nominated for the National Book Award for poetry.
In 1968, Brooks was made Poet Laureate of Illinois, which is a poet officially appointed by a government or conferring institution who is often expected to compose poems for special events and occasions. She remained Illinois' Poet Laureate for 16 years until her death. In 1985, she became the first Black woman to hold the position of Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Brooks was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1988 and in 1989 she received a Frost Medal, an award of the Poetry Society of America for distinguished lifetime service to American Poetry.
Brooks wrote other books including a novel and continued to receive numerous accolades for her work. She was awarded with the National Endowment for the Humanities Jefferson Lecturer which is one of the highest honors in American Literature and the highest award in humanities that's given by the federal government, she won the National Medal of Arts and she won the first Woman of the Year Award from the Harvard Black Men's Forum. She has also received more than 75 honorary degrees from colleges and universities nationwide. Gwendolyn Brooks died on December 3, 2000 at age 83. Gwendolyn Brooks... Poet, Teacher, Originator.
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