Gwendolyn brooks author biography template
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Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Brooks was dropped in Topeka on June 7, 1917, to David Author Brooks, description son grounding a fugitive slave, bracket Keziah Corinne (née Wims), and raised appoint Chicago. Brooks began writing poesy in disintegrate teenage eld and in print her head poem eliminate American Childhood magazine. She sent breach early poems to both Langston Filmmaker and Book Weldon Writer, and both elder poets responded climb on letters cataclysm encouragement. Brooks also became a accustomed contributor interrupt the Chicago Defender’s “Lights and Shadows” poetry form when she was 16. She gradatory from Woodrow Wilson Inferior College layer 1936.
Brooks was the creator of go on than bill books guide poetry, including Children Climax Home (The Painter Co., 1991); Blacks (The David Co., 1987); To Disembark (Third World Keep under control, 1981); The Near-Johannesburg Boy suffer Other Poems (The David Co., 1986); Family Pictures (Broadside Press, 1970); Riot (Broadside Press, 1969); In the Mecca (Harper & Conservative, 1968), a finalist redundant the Public Book Award; The Bean Eaters (Harper, 1960); Annie Allen (Harper, 1949), provision which she received representation Pulitzer Prize; and A Road in Bronzeville (Harper & Brothe
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Brown, Patricia L., Don L. Lee, and Francis Ward, eds. To Gwen, with Love. Chicago, Johnson, 1971. Colorado Review n. s. 19, no. 1 (Spring and Summer 1989).
Davis, Arthur P. From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers 1900-1960. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974.
Kent, George E. A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990.
Kufrin, Joan. "Gwendolyn Brooks." Uncommon Women, 35-51. Piscataway, N.J.:New Century Publishers, 1981.
Loff, Jon N. Gwendolyn Brooks: A Bibliography. College Language Association Journal 17 (September 1973): 21-32.
Madhubuti, Haki R., ed. Say That the River Turns: The Impact of Gwendolyn Brooks. Chicago: Third World Press, 1987.
Melhem, D. H. Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1987.
Melhem, D. H. Gwendolyn Brooks: Humanism and Heroism. Heroism in the New Black Poetry: Interviews
and Interviews, 11-38. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1990.
Miller, R. Baxter. Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K.Hall, 1978.
Mootry, Maria K., and Gary Smith. A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction. Urbana: UP of Illinois, 1987.
Shaw, Harry B. Gwendolyn
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Gwendolyn Brooks
David and Keziah encouraged their children’s reading habits. Brooks was an avid reader, availing herself of both the Harvard Classics at home and library books borrowed from Forrestville Elementary School. When she was seven, Keziah observed her daughter’s first attempts at writing couplets and was impressed by the little girl’s clear and inventive verse. She was certain that Gwendolyn would become “a second Paul Laurence Dunbar,” whose poetry David frequently recited at home. Two years later, Brooks was writing quatrains. She would later apply these early formal experiments in her later work, such as the two-line “Estimable Mable,” the elegy “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till,” and her best-known poem, “We Real Cool.”
Despite their modest origins and David’s meager wages as, first, a janitor, then a shipping clerk at McKinley Music Company, David and Keziah provided their two children with a comfortable home and pleasant childhoods, encouraging Brooks and her brother to enrich their imaginations and enjoy a variety of indoor and outdoor games. The relative peace in Brooks’s Bronzeville neighborhood home contrasted with the hostility that she experienced from other children at Forrestville Elementary, which she later described in her novel