Gwendolyn Brooks

The personal philosophy of Gwendolyn Brooks: "To be clean of heart, clear of mind, and claiming of what is right and just." Gwendolyn Brooks was the poet laureate of the State of Illinois, and the first African American author to be honored with a Pulitzer Prize.  

Gwendolyn Brooks was born on June 17, 1917 in Topeka, Kansas. She was raised in Chicago and lived there all her life. She knew she wanted to be a writer from the age of seven, and her parents, David Anderson Brooks and Keziah Corinne Brooks, encouraged her. At the age of thirteen, one of her poems was published by a children's magazine, American Childhood. While still a high school student, Gwendolyn Brooks met poets Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson, who encouraged her to continue to write. As a teenager, she began to submit her poetry to the poetry column of the Chicago Defender newspaper; the Defender eventually published more than seventy-five of Brooks' poems. She graduated from Wilson Junior College in 1936. In 1937 Brooks' poems were included in two anthologies.

Gwendolyn Brooks won an award at the Midwestern Writers Conference in 1943. It was the first of a lifetime of awards and honors, which included Guggenheim fellowships, an American Academy of Poets fellowship, the Frost Medal, a National Endowment for the Arts award, the Shelley Memorial Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and in 1949, a Pulitzer Prize for her work, Annie Allen. Brooks' first collection of poetry , A Street in Bronzeville, was published in 1945. She went on to author more than twenty books of poetry as well as a novel, Maud Martha (1953), and an autobiography (1972). Many of Brooks' works depict the life experiences of African Americans in the inner city, with an awareness of the effects that racial and ethnic identity have on each person's perspective.

In 1967 Brooks attended a Black Writers' Conference at Fisk University, and this experience inspired her to change her emphasis from writing about African American people to writing for us. She broke off her business relationship with a large New York publishing house and began to have her work published by smaller, African American publishers.She was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968, and used this office to bring poetry into the lives of not only students, but even hospital patients and prison inmates.

Gwendolyn Brooks passed away on December 3, 2000 at the age of eighty-three. She leaves a wealth of literary treasure as her legacy. She was a great poet and an extraordinary leader in the world of American literature.

Twenty years ago, Brooks was honored at the White House by President Jimmy Carter. This is the poem that she read:

The Mother

Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get, 
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair, 
The singers and workers that never handled the air.  
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed
children.
I have contracted.  I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized 
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, you tumults, your marriages, aches, 
and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine, 
Whine that the crime was other than mine?- - 
Since anyhow you are dead,
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the tructh to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.

Here is another poem by Gwendolyn Brooks:

The Crazy Woman

I shall not sing a May song.
A May song should be gay.
I'll wait until November
And sing a song of gray.

I'll wait until November
That is the time for me.
I'll go out in the frosty dark
And sing most terribly.

And all the little people
Will stare at me and say,
"That is the Crazy Woman
Who would not sing in May."

by Susan Robinson