Born: June 17, 1917, Topeka, KN

Education: Wilson Junior College, graduated 1936, poetry workshop, 1940s

Died: December 3, 2000, Chicago, IL

Growing up in Chicago, Brooks emerged as a writer ca. 1920s–60s. She was inspired by ambitious parents to learn and achieve. James Weldon Johnson and Langton Hughes were her early mentors. Joining poet Inez Cunningham Stark's workshop, which trained “Negro would-be poets in the very buckle of the Black Belt” (Gates and McKay, 1997, p. 1577), she studied the modernist writers who influenced her acclaimed first book, A Street in Bronzeville (1945).

Her poetry, which richly articulated urban realism, juxtaposed objects and words; controlled rhyme and meter; used formal and thematic irony; and translated public events into poetic details. Annie Allen (1949), her second book of poems, received a Pulitzer Prize in 1950. She was the first African American to earn that distinction. Depicting young hustlers in We Real Cool (1960, p. 1591), she wrote: “... We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die Soon.” When she embraced Black Power, Brooks linked literary generations. Addressing the Second Black Writers’ Conference at Fisk University in 1967, she praised their embrace of blackness. She published fiction and nonfiction works with independent black presses and urged “all black people” to patronize black arts. Awarded the National Medal of the Arts (1995), she affirmed the African American woman as “a person in the world–with wrongs to right, stupidities to outwit, with her man when possible, on her own when not” (Black World/Negro Digest, 1973, p. 52).