It was on September 27, 1950 that Gwendolyn Brooks was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her second book of poetry, Annie Allen, which chronicled the life of a young Black girl growing up in the Bronzeville neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side.
Madame Brooks was one of the most influential and widely read American poets of the 20th-century.
The Pulitzer Prize is a prestigious annual award honoring achievements in American journalism, literature, drama, and music.
This award broke a major racial barrier in American literary history.
Chicago’s front yards, pool halls, bungalows and back alleys were the poetic landscapes in Gwendolyn Brooks’ words. She wrote about the people she passed on the streets or in grocery stores, colloquial experiences like the elderly couples eating beans off chipped dinnerware. Through her poetry, Brooks offered a precise and compassionate look into life in the city of Chicago’s South Side.
“Her quote was ‘poetry is life distilled.’ She was doing a lot of distilling. She looked at things very carefully,” her daughter Nora Brooks Blakely says. “She observed well. She recorded life back to its livers.”
The poet would have turned 100 on June 7, 2017. Born in Topeka, Kan., Chicago was her adopted city, becoming both her home and inspiration. Seventeen years after her death, many here still fondly refer to her as “Our Miss Brooks.”