Gwendolyn Brooks

Overview

Gwendolyn Brooks born Topeka, KS June 7, 1917 (d. 2000). Poet, first Black Pulitzer Prize winner; early antiwar poems after World War II, linking war to racism.

Quotations

He had come down, He said, to clean the earth
Of the dirtiness of war.
Now tell of why His power failed Him there?
His power did not fail. It was that, simply,
He found how much the people wanted war.

("In Emanuel's Nightmare")