Gwendolyn Brooks

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Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks (June 7, 1917 – December 3, 2000) was an African-American poet. Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas to Keziah Wims Brooks and David Anderson Brooks. Brooks' mother was a former school teacher who left teaching for marriage and motherhood, and her father, the son of a runaway slave who fought in the Civil War, had given up his ambition to attend medical school to work as a janitor. When Brooks was only six weeks old, her family moved to Chicago, Illinois, where she grew up. Her home life was stable and loving, although she encountered racial prejudice in her neighborhood and in her schools. She first attended Hyde Park High School, a leading white high school, before transferring to all-black Wendell Phillips. Brooks eventually attended an integrated school, Englewood High School. Her enthusiasm for reading and writing was encouraged by her parents. Her father provided a desk and bookshelves, and her mother took her, when she was in high school, to meet Harlem Renaissance poets Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson. Brooks published her first poem in a children's magazine at the age of thirteen. When Brooks was sixteen years old, she had compiled a portfolio of around seventy-five published poems. Aged 17, Brooks stuck to her roots and began submitting her work to "Lights and Shadows", the poetry column of the "Chicago Defender," an African American Newspaper. Although her poems range in style from traditional ballads and sonn

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