Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas, and grew up in the United States during a period when American literature was steadily expanding its voices. Though she came into the world in the Kansas plains, it was the city of Chicago that would shape her life and work, becoming the landscape she returned to again and again across her career.
Brooks worked as a poet, novelist, and writer, composing in English throughout her life. She also spent time as a teacher, bringing her engagement with language into more direct contact with other people. Her education in Chicago took her through several institutions, including Wendell Phillips Academy High School, Hyde Park Academy High School, Englewood Technical Prep Academy, and Kennedy–King College, all of them rooted in the city she called home.
Over the course of her career, Brooks received a number of significant honors. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Robert Frost Medal, the Langston Hughes Medal, and the National Medal of Arts. She also held the position of United States Poet Laureate, a role that placed her work in a national context while she remained personally tied to Chicago. Each of these recognitions reflected the sustained attention her writing drew over many decades.
Brooks died on December 3, 2000, in Chicago — the same city where she had spent so much of her life writing, teaching, and receiving the honors that marked her long career. She was eighty-three years old at the time of her death, and the National Medal of Arts stood among the last and most prominent acknowledgments of her contributions to American letters.
Quotes by Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Brooks's insights on:
I don’t want people running around saying Gwen Brooks’s work is intellectual. That makes people think instantly about obscurity. It shouldn’t have to mean that, but it often seems to.
The forties and fifties were years of high poet-incense; the language-flowers were thickly sweet. Those flowers whined and begged white folks to pick them, to find them lovable. Then the ’60s: Independent fire!
I’ve always thought of myself as a reporter. When people ask why I don’t stop writing, I say, ‘Look at what’s happening in this world. Every day there’s something exciting or disturbing to write about.’ With all that’s going on, how could I stop?
Words can do wonderful things. They pound, purr. They can urge, they can wheedle, whip, whine. They can sing, sass, singe. They can churn, check, channelize. They can be a “Hup two three four.” They can forge a fiery army of a hundred languid men.
I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we’re here and we’re healthy.
I don’t like the idea of the black race being diluted out of existence. I like the idea of all of us being here.
