Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas in 1917. She began publishing poetry in the 1940s in national magazines such as Harper's and Poetry, and her first book A Street in Bronzeville appeared in 1945. Her second collection of poetry, Annie Allen, published in 1949, received the Pulitzer Prize. Her other collections of poems include The Bean Eaters (1960), Selected Poems (1963), Riot (1969), Beckonings (1975), Primer for Blacks (1980), among others. In 1985-86, she served as the Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress and in 1995 received the National Medal of Arts. She died in 2000 at her home in Chicago.