Gwendolyn Brooks is the writer who changed the future, inviting everyone to the party, while admitting “Art hurts, Art urges voyages, and it is easier to stay home.”
She started in a tradition. She was influenced and encouraged by James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes. They advised her to study the art and she dropped herself into the world of letters, as she had wanted to do since childhood. She had little in common with T.S. Eliot, e e cummings, and Walt Whitman, but from other poets she learned technique.
Her themes were always those of family, poverty, and the hard-earned path. She expressed what she saw lyrically; combining classicism and colloquialism never heard from a Black woman writer in exactly this way. Women are at the center of her literature and later she would speculate on what it meant to be “black first, a woman next, and a poet third.” In truth, all these were parallel in her life and work, with each taking precedence at different times.
A master of form, her novel Maud Martha (1953) is so distilled, it is like poetry, where every word counts. Annie Allen (1949), which won the Pulitzer, is narrative poetry of great originality.
Always the social conscience was evident, especially when the civil rights struggle began to fill the mind of the nation. Through her association with Black writers who were Black nationalists during the 1960s, Brooks entered a political world that altered her artistic consciousness. As she wrote of the dreams of Black people, Brooks transformed the commonplace and the vernacular to a new literature. Yet she said, “I want to be direct without sacrificing the kinds of music and picturemaking I’ve always been interested in.”
Originally she’d wanted to be a journalist, and Brooks saw herself as reporting the news of her people. Through the 1970s and 80s she clarified differences in the white and Black cultures. While Gwendolyn Brooks addressed a society torn apart, she wrote with compassion for all humankind. At the time of her death, she was a unifying figure, one of the best-loved poets in America.
Grace Cavalieri was Maryland’s tenth Poet Laureate Her new books are: Sticks And Stars (for children, 2026;) Fables from Italy and beyond (2025;) The Third Voice (2025;) and Owning The Not So Distant World which won the Blue Light Book Award, (2024;) Her most recent play in NYC was “Quilting The Sun” about ex-slave Harriet Powers. She founded and still produces “the Poet and the Poem” for public radio, now from the Library of Congress celebrating 50 years on-air in 2027. Twenty-five years of her podcasts were sent to the moon on lunar codex 2023. Among her awards, are the CPB silver medal, the George Garrett Award, Bordighera Prize, Paterson Prize, two Allen Ginsberg Awards. Cavalieri is featured in 2025’s The Best American Poetry Anthology. She is an Academy of American Poets Fellow.