The first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for the poetry collection, Annie Allen, Gwendolyn Brooks was born in 1917, in Topeka, Kansas to David Anderson Brooks, a janitor, and Kezia Brooks, a school teacher and classically trained pianist. Her mother taught at the very school in Topeka for which the court case Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas is named. Though she was born in Kansas, Brooks referred to herself as a Chicagoan, and it was there her education began on Chicago's South Side. She attended both integrated and segregated schools, completing her secondary education at Englewood High School in 1935 (1). By age fourteen, she was receiving praise for her poetry from none other than James Weldon Johnson (Gates, et al. 324).
According to our editor, Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Brooks held fast to the belief that poetry "was not the sole province of the privileged, educated few," and made her volumes of poetry available to general audiences for a small sum of less than five dollars (Gates, et al 324). Perhaps complicating the existing notions about the role of the black artist, Gwendolyn Brooks wrote for the everyman. Our text shares Brooks' philosophy:
"My aim, in my next future, is to write poems that will somehow successfully 'call'...all black people: black people in taverns, black people in alleys, black people in gutters, schools offices, factories, prisons, the consulate; I wish to reach black people in pulpits, black people in mines, on farms, on thrones, not always to 'teach'--I shall wish often to entertain, to illumine. My newish voice will not be an imitation of the contemporary young black voice, which I so admire, but an adaptation of today's Gwendolyn Brooks' voice" (qtd. in Gates, et al. 324).
Brooks' early poetry, as reflected in the collections Annie Allen (1949), Maud Martha (1953), and The Bean Eaters (1960), featured vignettes of everyday life. The commonplace was where Brooks found her inspiration, again emphasizing the lives and concerns of ordinary people. By 1967, black intellectuals and writers were experiencing a shift toward a defined sense of identity and the rise of a New Black Cultural Nationalism. At the Second Black Writer's Conference in that year, Brooks became acquainted with some of the key poets and thinkers of this movement, including Larry Neal and the poet and playwright Imamu Amiri Baraka (325).
In the video below, Brooks recites the poem for which she is most known, "We Real Cool."
