Gwendolyn Brooks: The First African American to Receive the Pulitzer Prize

The distinction of being the first African American to ever win the Pulitzer Prize was Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks or more popularly known as just Gwendolyn Brooks. She was born in Topeka, Kansas but was raised in Chicago, Illinois by her parents David Anderson, a janitor and Keziah Wims, a former teacher. Although Brook's family was not affluent, it was loving, nurturing and secure and Brooks could not have found a better place to learn about her race and cultivate her love for reading and gift for writing. From the beginning, her parents had been supportive of her interest in the literary field

After studying in different schools, Brooks eventually finished her high school education in Englewood High School and her college education in Wilson Junior College. At the age of thirteen, her first poem Eventide was published by the American Childhood Magazine. It was however, when she began submitting more of her poems to the Chicago Defender that Brooks began showing how prolific she was as a writer, with nearly a hundred of her works printed by the publication. This is perhaps why in the first place, despite her other literary works, Brooks is regarded first and foremost as a poet.

In 1938, Brooks and Henry Blakely got married. They had two children Henry and Nora and in between being a wife and mother, Brooks continued to write extensively, dealing mostly with accounts of the usual ordinary life of black city folks. Among her works are A Street in Bronzeville (1945), Maud Martha (1953), Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956), The Bean Eaters (1960), In the Mecca (1968), Primer for Blacks (1980), Young Poets Primer (1980), To Diembark (1981), The Near-Johannesburg Boy, and Other Poems (1986), Blacks (1987), Winnie (1988), Children Coming Home (1991). Her work Annie Allen (1949) won for her the Pulitzer Prize.

In the late 1960s her affiliation with the Black Arts movement after attending a black writer's conference at Fisk University began to slightly influence her tone and style. It seemed that her consciousness of issues in society seeped more into her writing, earning her a reputation as a protest poet.

Aside from writing, Brooks was also a respected educator. She taught her craft in Columbia University, Elmhurst College, Clay College of New York and at Chicago State University among others.

Brooks inexhaustible array of literary works is eclipsed only by her equally numerous awards and positions. Aside from the Pulitzer Prize, she also received the Midwestern Writers' Conference award for poetry, the Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Eunice Tietjens Prize.

She was also recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and deemed Poet Laureate of Illinois. She became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the first African American to ever become so. She was the poet laureate poetry consultant for the Library of Congress. The National Endowment of Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities have also recognized her. She is the recipient of more than seventy lifetime honorary awards.

Brooks died in the year 2000 at 83 years old.