May 1 - BlackFacts.com Black History Minute

BlackFacts.com: Learn/Teach/Create Black History

BlackFacts.com presents the black fact of the day for May 1st.

Gwendolyn Brooks became the first African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize.

She graduated from Wilson Junior College in Chicago in 1936. Her early verses appeared in the Chicago Defender, a newspaper written primarily for that city’s African American community.

Brooks published her first poem, "Eventide", in a children's magazine, American Childhood, when she was 13 years old. By the age of 16, she had already written and published approximately 75 poems.

Her characters were often drawn from the inner city life that Brooks knew well. She 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."

Annie Allen (1949), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, is a loosely connected series of poems related to an African American girl’s growing up in Chicago.

Her autobiographical "Report From Part One", including reminiscences, interviews, photographs and vignettes, came out in 1972, and "Report From Part Two" was published in 1995, when she was almost 80.

She was considered one of America’s leading black writers. She was praised for her use of language and the way people identified with her writing.

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