Before Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Rita Dove or Sonia Sanchez burst on the American landscape, another trailblazing Black woman poet and educator, Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), found her voice within the nation’s maelstrom of racism, sexism and economic and social injustice – becoming the first African-American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
