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By Cynthia Kirk
Broadcast: March 20, 2005
((THEME))
VOICE ONE:
I’m Shirley Griffith.
VOICE TWO:
And I’m Sarah Long with the VOA Special English program, PEOPLE IN AMERICA.
Today we tell about the life of award-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks. She was the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for Literature.
((THEME))
VOICE ONE:
Gwendolyn Brooks wrote hundreds of poems during her lifetime. She had more than twenty books published. She was known around the world for using poetry to increase understanding about black culture in America.
Gwendolyn Brooks wrote many poems about being black during the Nineteen-Forties and Nineteen-Fifties. Her poems described conditions among the poor, racial inequality and drug use in the black community. She also wrote poems about the struggles of black women.
But her skill was more than her ability to write about struggling black people. She was an expert at the language of poetry. She combined traditional European poetry styles with the African American experience.
VOICE TWO:
Gwendolyn Brooks once said that she wrote about what she saw and heard in the street. She said she found most of her material looking out of the window of her second-floor apartment house in Chicago, Illinois.
In her early poetry, Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about the South Side of Chicago. The South Side of Chicago is where many black people live. In her poems, the South Side is called Bronzeville. It was “A Street in Bronzeville” that gained the attention of literary experts in Nineteen-Forty-Five. Critics praised her poetic skill and her powerful descriptions about the black experience during the time. The Bronzeville poems were her first published collection.
Here she is reading from her Nineteen-Forty-Five collection, “A Street in Bronzeville.”
((GWENDOLYN BROOKS))
“My father, it is surely a blue place and straight. Right, regular, where I shall find no need for scholarly nonchalance or looks a little to the left or guards upon the heart.”
VOICE ONE:
In Nineteen-Fifty, Gwendolyn Brooks became the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. She won the prize for her second book of poems called “Annie Allen.” “Annie Allen” is a collection of poetry about the life of a Bronzeville girl as a daughter, a wife and mother. She experiences loneliness, loss, death and being poor.
Mizz Brooks said that winning the prize changed her life.
Her next work was a novel written in Nineteen-Fifty-Three called “Maud Martha.” “Maud Martha” received little notice when it first was published. But now it is considered an important work by some critics. Its main ideas about the difficult life of many women are popular among female writers today.
VOICE TWO:
Gwendolyn Brooks wrote poems about the black experience in America. She described the anger many blacks had about racial injustice and the feeling of being different. She used poetry to criticize those who did not show respect for the poor. Yet for all the anger in her writing, Gwendolyn Brooks was considered by many to be a gentle spirit and a very giving person.
By the early Nineteen-Sixties, Mizz Brooks had reached a high point in her writing career. She was considered one of America’s leading black writers. She was a popular teacher. She was praised for her use of language and the way people identified with her writing.
(MUSIC)
VOICE ONE:
Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas in Nineteen-Seventeen. But she grew up in Chicago. She began writing when she was eleven years old. She mailed several poems to a community newspaper in Chicago to surprise her family.
In a radio broadcast in Nineteen-Sixty-One, Mizz Brooks said her mother urged her to develop her poetic skills:
