Brooks, Gwendolyn (Elizabeth) (1917–2000)

US poet and novelist. In 1950 her verse narrative Annie Allen (1949) won the first Pulitzer Prize awarded to a black American woman. Other works include the volumes of verse A Street in Bronzeville (1945), Selected Poems (1963), and Riot (1970), and the novel Maude Martha (1953).

She was born in Topeka, Kansas, but based in Chicago. She was publicity director for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Chicago in the 1930s. She taught at many institutions and succeeded Carl Sandburg as poet laureate of Illinois (1968). She was poetry consultant at the Library of Congress 1985–86.