Gwendolyn Brooks in the poetry room at the Library of Congress in November 1985. Sixteen months later, Brooks’s brother, Raymond, was born.
In a 1967 interview with Roy Newquist, Brooks explained that her parents lived on Chicago’s South Side and that her mother had only gone to Topeka two and a half months before Brooks was born so that Keziah could give birth at the home of her parents, Luvenia and Moses Wims, where she enjoyed “long daily walks and raising fresh vegetables.”Five weeks after Gwendolyn was born, Keziah returned to Chicago. After leaving school, he moved to Chicago and focused on making a living. Brooks was the first African American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize, the winner of several lifetime achievement awards, and a holder of more than fifty honorary degrees.īrooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, to David Anderson Brooks, the Oklahoma-bredson of a runaway slave and a house slave of mixed parentage, and Keziah Corinne (née Wims), a former school teacher and aspiring concert pianist.David attended Fisk University for one year, aspiring to become a doctor. Like her predecessor and mentorLangston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks was one of the twentieth century’s most gifted and prolific American poets. Gwendolyn Brooks in 1950, not long after she won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Annie Allen.