She contributed to the New York Times, Negro Digest (later renamed Black World), and New York Herald Tribune from the 1940s through the 1960s. She published her first collection of poems, A Street in Bronzeville, in 1945 and was the first Black writer to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1950 for Annie Allen (1949). Following her graduation from Chicago’s Woodrow Wilson Junior College (now Kennedy-King College) in 1936, she worked as a maid and secretary for two years, and then went on to work for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Youth Council in 1938.īrooks studied poetry and eventually taught creative writing on the South Side of Chicago. As a young person, Brooks corresponded with and was critiqued and mentored by such Harlem Renaissance writers as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and James Weldon Johnson. At seventeen she published “To the Hinderer” in the Chicago Defender and was a regular contributor to that publication by the time she graduated from high school.
She began writing rhymes in a notebook at the age of seven and made her national debut at thirteen with the publication of her first poem entitled “Eventide” in American Child magazine. The African American poet Gwendolyn Brooks was born June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas, and moved with her family to Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood at the age of five.
