Brooks worked hard and successfully to reach a broad popular audience, but her poems are also deeply challenging. Yet out of it came poems addressing the general status of race in America in a style that mixes international modernism with local experience. Chicago's South Side black ghetto has always figured heavily in her work she is in a way a poet of that neighborhood. Thereafter she became more active in the Chicago wing of the Black Arts Movement and switched from her New York publisher, Harper and Row, to Broadside Press in Detroit and then Third World Press in Chicago. In the following decade, she attended a poetry workshop where she read widely in modernist poetry, while also being schooled in traditional forms and meters her first book, A Street in Bronzeville, appeared in 1945.Ī key moment in her development came in 1967 when she attended the Black Writers Conference at Fisk University. She also wrote a poetry column for the Chicago Defender. She attended Wilson Junior College in the mid-1930s, meanwhile meeting and being encouraged by James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes.

The family moved to Chicago almost immediately, and there Brooks spent most of her life. Her mother was a schoolteacher, her father a janitor. Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas.

Gwendolyn brooks about race