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Gwendolyn Brooks, "To the Diaspora"

BIOGRAPHY

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[from The Norton Introduction to Literature]

(1917–2000)

Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, and raised in Chicago, where she began writing poetry at the age of seven, and where she graduated from Wilson Junior College in 1936. Shortly after beginning her formal study of modern poetry at Chicago's Southside Community Art Center, Brooks produced her first book of poems, A Street in Bronzeville (1945). With her second volume, Annie Allen (1949), she became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize. Though her early work focused on what Langston Hughes called the “ordinary aspects of black life,” during the mid-1960s she devoted her poetry to raising African American consciousness and to social activism. In 1968, she was named the Poet Laureate of Illinois; from 1985 to 1986, she served as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. Her Selected Poems appeared in 1999.

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