We Real Cool (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1917. Her father, David Anderson Brooks, the son of a runaway slave, was the only child of twelve to finish high school. He wanted to be a doctor, but after a year of college, he was forced to become a janitor at a music publishing company because of money problems. Before Gwendolyn was born, her mother, Keziah Wims Brooks, was a schoolteacher and was studying to be a concert pianist. She would, however, settle in to become a Methodist Sunday-school teacher, a wife, and mother. Mrs. Brooks encouraged her daughter to continue with the rhymes she began writing at age seven. Later, Brooks’s mother took her to see poets James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes. Hughes read the poems the teenager had brought to the reading and encouraged her to pursue her literary aspirations. By age thirteen, Brooks published her first poem in American Childhood magazine, and by the time she was twenty, several of her poems had appeared in the Chicago Defender and her work was represented in two poetry anthologies.

Graduating from junior college and unable to land a job at the Chicago Defender, Brooks took a job as a maid; later, she worked as a secretary. At age twenty-one, Brooks joined the NAACP Youth Council and there met a man named Henry Lowington Blakely II, who was also a writer. The couple married in 1939 and their first child, Henry Lowington Blakely III, was born a year later. While Brooks and her husband were living in Chicago, she attended a workshop taught by Inez Cunningham Stark. Taking Stark’s advice to avoid cliché and make every word work, Brooks won first prize in a workshop contest and the 1944 and 1945 Midwestern Writers Conference prize for poems that would be included in her first book, A Street in Bronzeville (1945). In 1950, her volume of poetry Annie Allen (1949) won the Pulitzer Prize, marking the first time the prize was awarded to an African American. After a productive period in which she wrote several books, Brooks attended Fisk University’s Black Writer’s Conference and was simultaneously shocked and electrified by poets such as Don L. Lee and Amiri Baraka, who proclaimed black revolt, nationhood, and power. The fruits of her awakening first appeared in In the Mecca (1968), in which she untied herself from traditional poetic forms associated with whites and counseled her readers to leap into the whirlwind of righteous black anger and action. Among Brooks’s many volumes of poems, she also published one novel, Maud Martha (1953). Brooks has been awarded more than fifty honorary doctorates, and her awards and distinctions are numerous. In 1968, she became Poet Laureate of Illinois, and, from 1985 to 1986, she served as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. Honored by fans, peers, and presidents, Brooks is one of America’s most distinguished writers.