“I wrote about what I saw and heard inthe street,” she later said. Born in Topeka, Kansas, she moved with her family to Chicago when she was young and she would capture the explosive energies of the city’s mostly black South Sidein her first book of poems, A Street in Bronzeville. Gwendolyn Brooks was one of the most accomplished and acclaimed poets of the last century, the first black author to win the Pulitzer Prize and the first black woman to serve as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress-the forerunner of the U.S.
