On July 20, 1917, Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, and grew up in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago — the South Side community she would spend fifty years making into literature that the literary establishment mostly looked past until she forced them to look.

Brooks began publishing poetry as a teenager. In 1950, she received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Annie Allen — the first Black American to win a Pulitzer Prize in any category. The prize did not substantially change her reception: she continued to be largely excluded from the anthologies and course syllabi that constituted the official American literary canon.

In 1967, Brooks attended the Fisk University Black Writers' Conference and encountered the Black Arts Movement. The encounter shifted her. She moved from Harper & Row to small Black-owned publishers. She established poetry awards for high school students on Chicago's South Side funded from her own pocket. She visited prisoners, hospice patients, schools. She was named Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968 and held the position until her death.

Her work never became simpler. The later poems were formally dense and politically explicit in ways that the earlier work embedded in character. She held both registers simultaneously.

She died in 2000.