SHANEEN KNOWS

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