[人物传记] The Poet was the First African American to Win a Pulitzer Prize for Literature

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By Cynthia Kirk
2008-5-17

VOICE ONE:
I'm Shirley Griffith.
VOICE TWO:
And I'm Sarah Long with the VOA Special English program, PEOPLE IN AMERICA.
Today we tell about the life of award-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks. She was the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for Literature.
(MUSIC)
VOICE ONE:
Gwendolyn Brooks wrote hundreds of poems during her lifetime. She had more than twenty books/published. She was known around the world for using poetry to increase understanding about black culture in America.
Gwendolyn Brooks wrote many poems about being black during the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties. Her poems described conditions among the poor, racial inequality and drug use in the black community. She also wrote poems about the struggles of black women.
But her skill was more than her ability to write about struggling black people. She was an expert at the language of poetry. She combined traditional European poetry styles with the African American experience.
VOICE TWO:
Gwendolyn Brooks once said that she wrote about what she saw and heard in the street. She said she found most of her material looking out of the window of her second-floor apartment house in Chicago, Illinois.
In her early poetry, Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about the South Side of Chicago. The South Side of Chicago is where many black people live. In her poems, the South Side is called Bronzeville. It was "A Street in Bronzeville" that gained the attention of literary experts in nineteen forty-five. Critics praised her poetic skill and her powerful descriptions about the black experience during the time. The Bronzeville poems were her first/published collection.
Here she is reading from her nineteen forty-five collection, "A Street in Bronzeville."
GWENDOLYN BROOKS:
"My father, it is surely a blue place and straight. Right, regular, where I shall find no need for scholarly nonchalance or looks a little to the left or guards upon the heart."