In the following decade, she attended a poetry workshop where she read widely in modernist poetry, while also being schooled in traditional forms and meters her first book, A Street in Bronzeville, appeared in 1945.Ī key moment in her development came in 1967 when she attended the Black Writers Conference at Fisk University. She also wrote a poetry column for the Chicago Defender. She attended Wilson Junior College in the mid-1930s, meanwhile meeting and being encouraged by James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes. The family moved to Chicago almost immediately, and there Brooks spent most of her life. Her mother was a schoolteacher, her father a janitor.
Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas.
