(Image Source: Famous Poets & Poems)Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, and raised in Chicago, Illinois. A graduate of Wilson Junior College, she studied modern poetry with Inez Cunning Stark Boulton at Chicago’s Southside Community Art Center. After becoming a writer, she ran workshops for underprivileged youths and taught her craft at various schools, including City College in New York. Brooks’s primary subject was the African-American experience: her first book, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), took its title from the name journalists applied to Chicago’s black ghetto. Like Langston Hughes, Brooks depicted the lives of “ordinary ” people; without succumbing to sentimentality, she celebrated their vitality in the face of hardship. After 1967, when Brooks’s “Blackness..[confronted her] with a shrill spelling of itself,” her work grew more militant and political. Her poetry relies on strong rhythms, and its textured diction derives in part from gospel preachers and from street talk. She increasingly moved away from closed forms to open, improvisational ones. (Biographical Summary from Norton's Anthology of Poetry, 4th Edition.)
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