[6] Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas, and was raised on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois.

[2] Her father, a janitor for a music company, had hoped to pursue a career as a doctor but sacrificed that aspiration to support getting married and raising a family.

[2] Brooks' mother had taught at the Topeka school that later became involved in the Brown v. Board of Education racial desegregation case.

[7] Family lore held that Brooks' paternal grandfather had escaped slavery to join the Union forces during the American Civil War.

[11] According to biographer Kenny Jackson Williams, due to the social dynamics of the various schools, in conjunction with the era in which she attended them, Brooks faced much racial injustice.

Over time, this experience helped her understand the prejudice and bias in established systems and dominant institutions, not only in her own surroundings but in every relevant American mindset.

[10] After her early educational experiences, Brooks did not pursue a four-year college degree because she knew she wanted to be a writer and considered it unnecessary.

[13] In her early years, she received commendations on her poetic work and encouragement from James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright and Langston Hughes.

[15] In 1944, she achieved a goal she had been pursuing through continued unsolicited submissions since she was 14 years old: two of her poems were published in Poetry magazine's November issue.

... She easily catches the pathos of petty destinies; the whimper of the wounded; the tiny accidents that plague the lives of the desperately poor, and the problem of color prejudice among Negroes.

[18] Brooks' second book of poetry, Annie Allen (1949), focused on the life and experiences of a young Black girl growing into womanhood in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago.

[12] In 1953, Brooks published her first and only narrative book, a novella titled Maud Martha, which is a series of 34 vignettes about the experience of black women entering adulthood, consistent with the themes of her previous works.

Maud's concern is not so much that she is inferior but that she is perceived as being ugly," states author Harry B. Shaw in his book Gwendolyn Brooks.

[19] In contrast, literary scholar Mary Helen Washington emphasizes Brooks's critique of racism and sexism, calling Maud Martha "a novel about bitterness, rage, self-hatred, and the silence that results from suppressed anger".

Here, according to one version of events, she met activists and artists such as Imamu Amiri Baraka, Don L. Lee and others who exposed her to new black cultural nationalism.

In 1968, she published one of her most famous works, In the Mecca, a long poem about a mother's search for her lost child in a Chicago apartment building.

[22] The Rare Book & Manuscript Library of the University of Illinois acquired Brooks's archives from her daughter Nora Blakely.

[15] Brooks had so enjoyed the mentoring relationship that she began to engage more frequently in that role with the new generation of young black poets.