The poem is an intricate portrait of a woman who has had an abortion, and it manages to ask political questions without taking an obvious for-against stand in the abortion rights debates. We love it for its emotional complexity and sensitivity on a really difficult topic: abortion. Brooks died of cancer in 2000 in her home on the south side of Chicago after a long life and a pretty sweet career.īrooks's poem ' the mother,' is one of her most well-known poems. As she grew older, her poems became more and more overtly political, and she became very involved with the Black Arts Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, through which she became a fierce advocate for African American writers and artists. She was the first African American to ever win the Pulitzer Prize (in 1950), and she was appointed the Poet Laureate of Illinois (in 1968).įrom her first book of poetry onward, our gal Gwendolyn was interested in giving voice to people who had been voiceless or marginalized she wrote particularly about African Americans and the working class. She wrote a whole lot of poetry, she taught creative writing, she lectured. Brooks went on to have the type of career that poets dream of. (Seriously: it was called 'Eventide.') She went to junior college in Chicago, then started working for the NAACP, all before publishing A Street in Bronzeville, her first book of poems, in 1945. She was a pretty precocious kid she published her first poem at the age of 13. She was born in 1917 in Topeka, Kansas, and moved to Chicago at a young age. Gwendolyn Brooks was a pretty awesome poet if we do say so ourselves.

What did gwendolyn brooks write about