DEC 4: Gwendolyn Brooks, a poet who grew up in the slums of Chicago in the first half of the 20th Century and made history by becoming the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize, died on Sunday. She was 83.Brooks was diagnosed with cancer about a week ago, Dr. Jifunza Wright, her attending physician, told the Chicago Tribune. She died at her South Side Chicago home, "pen in hand, surrounded by verse and people she loved," the Tribune reported on Monday. Brooks' influence on poetry was incalculable.She broke down barriers in the subjects she addressed and in the path her career took. "At a time when racism was so rampant, Gwendolyn Brooks was almost like a literary Joe Louis," Sterling Plumpp, a professor in the departments of African-American Studies and English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told the Tribune."At a time when black people were being clubbed into submission because of their race, it was her eloquence in her poetry that got many African-Americans to look at their community, and to see their minds as something of great worth," he added.She published her first of 20 books in 1945, "A Street in Bronzeville." Five years later, in 1950, she became the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize in poetry for "Annie Allen."President John F. Kennedy invited her to read at the Library of Congress in 1962, and in 1985 she was appointed poetry consultant to the library. In 1968 she was named poet laureate of Illinois, and in 1994, she was chosen to receive the federal government's highest award in humanities, the Jefferson Lecturer."Of all the American poets in our lifetime, she has been a legend," Elise Paschen, executive director of the Poetry Society of America, told the Tribune."Her poetry has been a great exemplar to her own generation; and to the generations that came up after her, she's been a great model, for her formal ingenuity, for her voice," she added. Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, on June 7, 1917, and her parents moved to Chicago when she was still an infant. She was educated in an integrated high school and graduated from Wilson Junior College in 1936.But her literary career had already begun. Her poems were published by a local newspaper. They dealt with her family and friends and what it was like to grow up black in a society still very much divided along racial lines. Along with her husband, Henry Blakely, who she married in 1938, she lived in a kitchenette apartment in Chicago's South Side.She had two children, and in between she wrote. Before her death on Sunday, the Tribune reported family and close friends read some of those poems to her."Nothing in particular, but mainly her poems and what we liked," Haki Madhubuti, Brooks' publisher at Third World Press and founder of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center at Chicago State University, told the newspaper. Just before the poet took her last breath, her daughter, Nora Brooks Blakely, placed a pen in her hand, Tribune reported. Brooks also is survived by a son, Henry Blakely III; and one grandson. Services are pending.
