ABSTRACT
Pulitzer Prize-winner Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, and began writing verses at the age of seven. Her inspiration came from poets James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes, whom she met in Chicago, Illinois, where she spent all of her childhood. Her first poem, “Eventide,” was published in American Childhood, a magazine for young people, when she was only thirteen years old. She started her own neighborhood newspaper and, by age seventeen, she was a regular contributor to the Chicago Defender, where more than seventy-five of her poems and other writings appeared in its “Lights and Shadows” column.
