Gwendolyn Brooks: I wrote about what I saw and heard in the street. I lived in a small second-floor apartment at the corner, and I could look first on one side and then the other. There was my material.

It's the birthday of the woman who wrote, "We real cool. We / Left school. We / Lurk late. We / Strike straight." Gwendolyn Brooks, who was born in Topeka, Kansas (1917), but grew up and spent nearly all her life in the Southside of Chicago. She began writing poems when she was a child and published her first poem at the age of 13.

Her parents encouraged her literary ambitions and put her into contact with Langston Hughes, to whom she wrote and sent her poems. Langston Hughes wrote back to her: "You have talent. Keep writing! You'll have a book published one day."

She published her second collection of poetry, Annie Allen, in 1949, and in it she used an experimental form that she called the sonnet-ballad. Critics liked it, and a Times book reviewer praised her work as "full of insight and wisdom and pity, technically dazzling." The next year, in 1950, she became the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize.

She said about her poetry: "I wrote about what I saw and heard in the street. I lived in a small second-floor apartment at the corner, and I could look first on one side and then the other. There was my material." Writer's Almanac