Poet Gwendolyn Brooks Dies

Dec. 4, 2000 -- Gwendolyn Brooks, who promoted an understandingof black culture through her candid, compassionate poetry andbecame the first African-American to win a Pulitzer Prize, has diedof cancer. She was 83.

She wrote hundreds of poems, had more than 20 books published,and had been Illinois’ poet laureate since 1968. Her poetry delvedinto poverty, racism and drugs among black people.

“I believe that we should all know each other, we humancarriers of so many pleasurable differences,” she said in a recentinterview. “To not know is to doubt, to shrink from, sidestep ordestroy.”

‘We Real Cool’

Dr. Jifunza Wright, who was Brooks’ attending physician, saidthe poet died Sunday at her home, surrounded by friends and familymembers who had been taking turns reading to her.

Her Pulitzer was awarded in 1950 for her second book of poetry,Annie Allen.

One of her most famous poems is “We Real Cool,” from the 1960collection The Bean Eaters. The short poem sums up hopelessnessin eight lines:

We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.

Brooks continued to write throughout her life and had completedher most recent volume of poems late this summer, her agent CarolynAguila said.

“Her activity regarding her creative muse was very high,”Aguila said. “She continued to speak and read and do all sorts ofappearances.”

In 1989, Brooks received a lifetime achievement award from theNational Endowment for the Arts. She was named the 1994 JeffersonLecturer by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the highesthonor bestowed by the federal government for work in thehumanities.

Spurred by War, Racism

Brooks was born in Topeka, Kan., in 1917, but grew up inChicago.

She began writing at 11 when she mailed several poems to acommunity newspaper in Chicago to surprise her family. Her earlyworks were mostly autobiographical, detailing the death of friends,her relationship with her family and their reaction to war andracism.

After a number of her poems had been published in Chicago’sblack newspapers, Brooks sent 19 poems to a list of publishers.

“I said to myself, I’m going to go straight down that listuntil somebody takes these poems,” she said.

Harper & Bros., now HarperCollins, was at the top of the list.Its editors suggested she needed more poems, then published thecollection in 1945 in a book called A Street in Bronzeville.

Annie Allen followed four years later.

Brooks often referred to her works as her family, which alsoincluded black people in general.

“If you have one drop of blackness blood in you — yes, ofcourse it comes out red — you are mine,” she once said. “You area member of my family.”

But she was quick to point that she wasn’t exclusionary, notingthat she had the liveliest interest in other families.

Awarded for ‘Being Me’

Brooks was also known as a tireless teacher, promoter andadvocate of creative writing in general and poetry in particular.

“She mentored literally three generations of poets — black,white, Hispanic, Native American,” said longtime friend, poet andliterature professor Haki Madhubuti, who founded the GwendolynBrooks Center for Creative Writing and Black Literature at ChicagoState University. “She was all over the map sharing her gifts.”

She used her prestige as Illinois’ poet laureate to inspireyoung writers, establishing the Illinois Poet Laureate Awards in1969 to encourage elementary and high school students to write.

She said she found it intoxicating and exciting to see youngtalent. She would attend poetry slams in Chicago, where aspiringpoets would line up to read their works, and she often financedawards to the poet voted the best reader by the audience.

Brooks once said of the awards she received — including having abronze sculpture of her placed in the National Portrait Gallery —that there was only one that meant a great deal to her:

“In December 1967, at a workshop called the Kumuba Workshop ina rundown theater in Chicago, I was given an award for just beingme, and that’s what poetry is to me — just being me.”

Survivors include her daughter, Nora Brooks Blakely, son HenryBlakely III, and a grandson. Her husband, poet and writer, HenryBlakely Jr., died in 1996.