Gwendolyn Brooks (born 1917) was the first African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and is best known for her intense poetic portraits of urban African Americans. Gwendolyn Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas. The eldest...

Gwendolyn Brooks holds a unique position in American letters. Not only has she combined a strong commitment to racial identity and equality with a mastery of poetic techniques, but she also has managed to bridge the gap between the academic poets of...

Throughout her career Gwendolyn Brooks has been committed to a political vision of black liberty and equality while refusing to sacrifice the complexity and sheer beauty of her art. In light of her achievement she has become considered by many to be...

Poet Gwendolyn Brooks's writings explore the discrepancies between appearance and morality, between good and evil. Her images are often ironic and coy; her work is distinctly African American. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950, the first time...

The first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize, Brooks is considered a major poet of the twentieth century. She is known for her sensitive representations of black urban life and for combining African American vernacular speech with the poetic...

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks (June 7, 1917 – December 3, 2000) was an African American...

THE LITERARY spin-doctors have been unkind to Gwendolyn Brooks, one result of which is that her representation in major anthologies of English-language verse has been patchy; nothing in the Penguin Contemporary American Poetry, or in various "representative" collections of African- American poetry, and her...

A LIFE OF GWENDOLYN BROOKS By George E. Kent University Press of Kentucky. 287 pp. $25 IN HER ESSAY about first encountering Zora Neale Hurston's work, Alice Walker cautions that a people must not discard its geniuses. She asserts that if we neglect our...

You won't find any volumes of poetry in Don Scheidt's house. A retired tax collector who is quick to point out that the IRS is not a very poetic organization, Scheidt does not enjoy reading haiku, iambic pentameter or free...

In the following essay, Lindberg discusses Brooks's artistic development, critical reception, and identity as a spokesperson for African-American women. According to Lindberg, Brooks sought to overcome "the double bind of a black woman artist who would be heard as something other than victim of or exile from her race and class."

In the following essay, Taylor offers an overview of Brooks's poetry, artistic development, and critical interpretation.

In the following essay, Christian examines the social context and presentation of Maud Martha. According to Christian, Brooks's "emphasis on the black girl within the community is a prefiguring of black women's novels of the sixties and seventies, which looked at the relationship between the role of women in society and the racism that embattled the black community."

Describes the life of famous author, Gwendolyn Brooks. Explores her early life, influences and works.

A woman's guilt and regret she feels is evident in how she talks to her dead unborn children in the poem "The Mother" by Gwendolyn Brooks. She regrets the things she will never be able to do with them and how she "loved" them all.