We were honored to be participate in MTA's grand opening of the Expo Line, Held in the West Angeles Church parking lot located at 3600 Crenshaw Blvd., Los Angeles, 90018.

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas, the first child of David Anderson Brooks and Keziah Wims.

Brooks published her first poem in a children's magazine at the age of thirteen. By the time she was sixteen, she had compiled a portfolio of around 75 published poems. At seventeen, she started submitting her work to "Lights and Shadows", the poetry column of the Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper. Although her poems ranged in style from traditional ballads and sonnets to using blues rhythms in free verse, her characters were often drawn from the poor of the inner city. During this same period, she also attended Wilson Junior College, from where she graduated in 1936. After failing to obtain a position with the Chicago Defender, Brooks began to work a series of typing jobs.

By 1941, Brooks was taking part in poetry workshops. A particularly influential one was organized by Inez Cunningham Stark, an affluent white woman with a strong literary background. The group dynamic of Stark's workshop, in which all the participants were African American, energized Brooks. Her poetry began to be taken seriously.[4]. In 1943 she received an award for poetry from the Midwestern Writers' Conference.

Brooks' first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), published by Harper and Row, earned instant critical acclaim. She received her first Guggenheim Fellowship and was included as one of the “Ten Young Women of the Year” in Mademoiselle magazine. With her second book of poetry, Annie Allen (1950), she became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry; she also was awarded Poetry magazine’s Eunice Tietjens Prize.