Gwendolyn Brooks is the female poet who has been most responsive to changes in the black
community, particularly in the community's vision of itself. The constant in Brooks' poetry has
been her loyalty to characters who find themselves trapped in an environment scarred by racial
discrimination, poverty, and violence. Gwendolyn Brooks, the daughter of David Anderson
Brooks, the son of a runaway slave, and Keziah Corinne (Wims) Brooks, was born on June 7,
1917, in Topeka Kansas. Brooks was the first African-American to win a Pulitzer Prize for
poetry in 1950, and the first African-American woman to be inducted into the National Institute
of Arts and Letters. The Brook's family moved to Chicago shortly after her birth. Her parents
set a high priority on literature, and she began to collect her poems in notebooks at age eleven.
Gwendolyn had a difficult time in school and was rejected for her shyness as well as her skin
Brooks attended Hyde Park High School, the leading white high school in the city, but transferred
to the all-black Wendall Phillips, then to the integrated 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. Brooks was influenced at first by the
Harlem Renaissance. Her early work featured the sonnet and the ballad, and she experimented
with adaptations of conventional meter. Later, development of the black arts movement in the
sixties, along with conceptions of a black aesthetic, turned her toward free verse and an
abandonment of the sonnet as inappropriate to the times. However, she retained, her interest in
the ballad, its musicality and accessibility, and in what she called "verse journalism." Brooks died
in December 2000. Brooks writing is objective, but her characters speak for themselves. She
uses ordinary speech. ...