Cynthia in the Snow

Heralded author, poet, and teacher Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks grew up in the South Side Chicago, Illinois, neighborhood of Bronzeville. By age 13, she’d published her first poem; in 1950, she won a Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection Annie Allen, making her the first Black American to do so. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968, and held that position for 32 years until her death in 2000. In 1976, Brooks was also the first Black woman inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In addition to this, she was Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1985 to 1986.

Brooks’s childhood experiences in Bronzeville, an area nicknamed the “Black Metropolis” because it was home to many influential writers, artists, and key figures of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950’s and 1960’s, informed her work. Much of Brooks’s work focuses on Black joy and the joy of childhood, often inspired from her own childhood.

“Cynthia in the Snow” was published in the 1956 collection Bronzeville Girls and Boys, which features poems that celebrate and explore the joy, freedom, and imagination of Black childhood. Intended for young readers, Bronzeville Girls and Boys is an illustrated picture book; like many children’s poetry collections, it is flexible in

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