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Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2001) graduated from Wilson Junior College in 1936. Early on she won prizes for her poetry, including the Poetry Workshop awards at the summer Midwestern Writers conference at Northwestern University in 1943 and 1944. That same year, she won the annual Writers Conference prize in Chicago. She began publishing in 1945 in Poetry magazine, and soon her work appeared in a variety of other publications. Other prizes followed, including a creative writing award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1946 and Guggenheim fellowship in 1946 and 1947. In 1950 she became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize, for Annie Allen (1949). She also wrote a novel, Maud Martha in 1953, and several other volumes of poetry. Throughout her life, she also helped black youth by funding writing and poetry workshops. Later in life, she was the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Senior Fellowship for Literature (1989), followed by the National Book Foundation’s medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (1994).

The two poems below were written in 1960. The first, “A Bronzeville Mother,” was originally published in The Bean Eaters in 1960, and, was recently published in Christopher Metress, ed., The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary History (Charlottseville: University of Virginia Press, 2002, 313-317). According to Metress, “Brooks imagines the murder [of Emmett Till] from the perspective of Carolyn Bryant. It remains, more than forty-years later, one of her most anthologized works.”

The second poem, “The Last Quatrain,” was written as a companion to the first, and was published in the same book originally, and is included in Metress, 317-318. “In it,” writes Metress, “Brooks explores further the idea that the Till murder violates all narrative conventions and expectations, possessing s it does a kind of surreal quality that moves toward ambiguity rather than understanding” (317).