Celebrated African-American poet Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born on 7 July 1917 in Topeka, Kansas, but the family moved to Chicago shortly after her birth, where in 1936 she graduated from Wilson Junior College. She published her first poem “Eventide” in 1930, in the American Childhood Magazine. Her subsequent meeting with James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes leads her to delve into modernist poetry, whose elements she combines with African-American ones (images of black neighborhoods, blues and jazz rhythms) to create her characteristic style. Brooks takes her themes from everyday black life. As she once wrote “ Poetry is life distilled.” She claimed that, “If you want a poem you only have to look out of a window. There is material always, walking or running, fighting or screaming or singing” (http://americanpoetsproject.com/). Her feminist beliefs also gave birth to many poems about womanhood and motherhood.

By 1934 Brooks had become an adjunct member of the staff of The Chicago Defender. In 1938 she marries Henry Blakely and moves to Chicago's South Side. With her first book of poetry, published in 1945, she receives a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 1968, she was made Poet Laureate of Illinois. Her other awards include the Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as more than 75 honorary degrees from colleges and universities. In 1950 Gwendolyn Brooks became the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize, and the second to be appointed poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. As a feminist, womanhood and motherhood are key themes to her work. The turning point in her career came in 1967, when she became more involved in the Black Arts Movement and started producing more aggressive work that contains elements of social protest. For her poetic virtuosity, she was selected by the National Endowment for the Humanities as the 1994 Jefferson Lecturer, the highest award in the humanities given by the federal government. She died in Chicago, in 2000, at the age of 83.