What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.

(Family lore held that her paternal grandfather had escaped slavery to join Union forces during the American Civil War. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950 and was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968 and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1985. Her poems many publiGwendolyn Brooksd while Gwendolyn Brooks attended Wilson Junior College ranged in style from traditional ballads and sonnets to poems using blues rhythms in free verse.

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks (June 7 1917 – December 3 2000) was an American poet.