Authors Like Gwendolyn Brooks

Langston Hughes

American · The Weary Blues (1926), Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951)

Hughes (1901–1967) became the best-known poet of the Harlem Renaissance with The Weary Blues, poems built on the rhythms of blues and jazz. Montage of a Dream Deferred is a book-length sequence about Harlem after the Second World War. When the teenage Brooks sent him her poems at her mother's urging, he wrote back and told her to keep writing.

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Paul Laurence Dunbar

American · Majors and Minors (1896), Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896)

Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1872 to parents who had been enslaved in Kentucky, and died there of tuberculosis in 1906, aged 33. Lyrics of Lowly Life, with an introduction by William Dean Howells, made him nationally known. He wrote both in conventional English and in dialect; the dialect poems were his most popular in his lifetime, and he reportedly felt limited by them. His poem “Sympathy” gave Maya Angelou the title I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Robert Hayden

American · A Ballad of Remembrance (1962), Words in the Mourning Time (1970)

Hayden (1913–1980) grew up in Detroit and wrote “Those Winter Sundays”, one of the most anthologised American poems of the century, and “Middle Passage”, about the slave ship Amistad. In April 1966 he won the poetry prize at the World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar; weeks later, at a Black writers' conference at Fisk University, younger poets denounced him for refusing to call himself a Black poet. He insisted on “American poet”. From 1976 to 1978 he was the first African American Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

Lucille Clifton

American · Good Times (1969), Two-Headed Woman (1980)

Clifton (1936–2010) was born in Depew, New York, and wrote short, mostly lower-case poems about family, the body and Black women's history. Good Times, her first book, was named one of the year's ten best books by The New York Times; Two-Headed Woman won the Juniper Prize; and Blessing the Boats won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2000.

Rita Dove

American · Thomas and Beulah (1986), On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999)

Dove was born in Akron, Ohio, in 1952. Thomas and Beulah, two linked sequences about a husband and wife in Akron drawn from her grandparents' lives, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1987; she was the second African American to win it, after Brooks. She was US Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995, the first African American in the post after it took that name; Brooks had been the last to hold it as Consultant in Poetry.

Terrance Hayes

American · Lighthead (2010), American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018)

Hayes was born in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1971. Lighthead won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2010; it contains “The Golden Shovel”, in which each line ends with a word from Brooks's “We Real Cool”, in order. The form spread, and The Golden Shovel Anthology (2017) gathered poems written that way for her centenary. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2014.

Elizabeth Alexander

American · The Venus Hottentot (1990), American Sublime (2005), The Light of the World (2015)

Alexander was born in Harlem in 1962. American Sublime was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and in January 2009 she read “Praise Song for the Day” at Barack Obama's inauguration. In 2005 she edited The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks for the Library of America. The Light of the World is a memoir of her husband's sudden death. She has been president of the Mellon Foundation since 2018.

Eve L. Ewing

American · Electric Arches (2017), 1919 (2019)

Ewing was born in 1986 and grew up in Chicago's Logan Square; she teaches at the University of Chicago. Electric Arches mixes poems, prose and drawings about a Black girlhood in the city. 1919 is a collection about the Chicago race riot of that year, which began with the drowning of a Black teenager, Eugene Williams. With Nate Marshall she wrote No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, a play commissioned by the Poetry Foundation for Brooks's centenary.

Jackie Kay

Scottish · The Adoption Papers (1991), Trumpet (1998), Red Dust Road (2010)

Kay was born in Edinburgh in 1961 to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father, and adopted as a baby by a white couple who raised her near Glasgow. The Adoption Papers tells that story in the voices of the birth mother, the adoptive mother and the daughter. Trumpet, a novel inspired by the jazz musician Billy Tipton, won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and Red Dust Road is a memoir of finding her birth parents. She was Scotland's Makar, its national poet, from 2016 to 2021.

Grace Nichols

Guyanese-British · i is a long memoried woman (1983), The Fat Black Woman's Poems (1984)

Nichols was born in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1950 and moved to Britain in 1977. i is a long memoried woman, a cycle of poems following an African woman through enslavement in the Caribbean, won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1983. The Fat Black Woman's Poems, published by Virago, is comic and defiant. She was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2021.