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. Poet Laureate. 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. “I wrote about what I saw and heard inthe street,” she later said. “I lived in a small second-floor apartment at the corner, and I could look first on one side and then the other. There was my material.”  From this material, Brooks made a forceful and passionate poetry that fused modernist aesthetics with African-American cultural tradition. For poet Elizabeth Alexander it is Brooks formal range—she experiments here with sonnets, ballads, spirituals, blues, and full and off-rhymes—that is most impressive: “she is nothing short of a technical virtuoso.”

Also available from The Library of America, in both print and e-book editions: The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, a career-spanning survey of Brooks's poetry, selected and introduced by Elizabeth Alexander.