Analysis of poems
- A Bronzeville Mother Loiters In Mississippi. Meanwhile, A Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon
- A Penitent Considers Another Coming Of Mary
- A Song In The Front Yard
- A Sunset Of The City
- Boy Breaking Glass
- Garbageman: The Man With The Orderly Mind
- Jessie Mitchell’s Mother
- Kitchenette Building
- Mayor Harold Washington
- My Dreams, My Works, Must Wait Till After Hell
Quotes
''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.''
All quotationsBiography
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was an African-American poet. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968 and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1985.
Biography
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas, the first child of David Anderson Brooks and Keziah Wims. Her mother was a former school teacher who had chosen that field because she could not afford to attend medical school. (Family lore held that her paternal grandfather had escaped slavery to join Union forces during the American Civil War.) When Brooks was six weeks old, her family moved to Chicago, Illinois during the Great Migration; from then on, Chicago was her hometown. She went by the nickname "Gwendie" among her close friends.
Her home life was stable and loving, although she encountered racial prejudice in her neighborhood and in schools. She attended Hyde Park High School, the leading white high school in the city, before transferring to the all-black Wendell Phillips. Brooks eventually attended an integrated school, Englewood High School. In 1936 she graduated from Wilson Junior College. These four schools gave her a perspective on racial dynamics in the city that continued to influence her work.
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