African American poet, long the poet laureate of Black Chicago and, in 1950, the first Black American to win a Pulitzer Prize (for Annie Allen, 1949). Brooks grew up in the Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side — the Black urban district created by the Great Migration — which would be the ground of most of her poetry. A Street in Bronzeville (1945), her first book, introduced her characteristic technique: tight formal verse (sonnets, ballad stanzas, blues) applied to the interior life of ordinary Black urban people, without either sociological flattening or uplift.
Annie Allen is a formally ambitious book-length verse portrait of a Black woman's life from girlhood through disappointed marriage. The Bean Eaters (1960) contains her most-anthologized short poems — "We Real Cool," "The Ballad of Rudolph Reed," "The Lovers of the Poor." The 1967 Fisk University Black Writers Conference, where she encountered the young poets of what would become the Black Arts Movement (Amiri Baraka, Haki Madhubuti, Sonia Sanchez), was the turning point of her career: she left her mainstream publisher, moved to Black-owned presses (Broadside, Third World Press), and adopted a more open, street-inflected style in In the Mecca (1968), Riot (1969), and Family Pictures (1970).
She served as Illinois Poet Laureate from 1968 until her death in 2000 — thirty-two years — and as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (the post now called Poet Laureate) in 1985–86. Her editing, teaching, and funding of younger Black poets, mostly out of her own pocket, shaped a generation of American poetry from below.