Cynthia in the Snow

Gwendolyn Brooks was surrounded and supported by a community of other Black writers like Langston Hughes, (The Negro Speaks of Rivers, Not Without Laughter, The Weary Blues), Haki R. Madhubuti, (Black Culture Centers: Politics of Survival and Identity, Groundwork, YellowBlack), Imamu Amiri Baraka, (A Black Mass, Black Magic, The Revolutionary Theatre) and Richard Wright (Native Son, The Color Curtain, Haiku: This Other World). Growing up, her mother had told her that she would become like the Lady Paul Laurence Dunbar, a late 19th and early 20th century Black American poet and author.

Richard Wright strongly championed Brooks’s work, telling the editors of Harper & Brothers Her 1945 collection of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, which featured poems about Black people in early-to-mid century Chicago:

There is no self-pity here, not a striving for effects. She takes hold of reality as it is and renders it faithfully […] She easily catches the pathos of petty destinies; the whimper of the wounded; the tiny accidents that plague the lives of the desperately poor, and the problem of color prejudice among Negroes. (“Frost? Williams? No, Gwendolyn Brooks”)

Brooks also had a near-lifelong mentorship and friendship with Langston Hughes.