NPR Remembers Gwendolyn Brooks

Like many who are celebrating Gwendolyn Brooks's centenary next month, NPR's Karen Grigsby Bates takes a moment to remember the great poet. Grigsby Bates focuses on the generosity Brooks was known for throughout her life, and in particular, after she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950, which enabled her to provide wider financial support to struggling poets in her community. Let's take it from there:

Brooks loved being able to do nice things for other people, even though she did not live a lavish lifestyle herself. "It was more important to help a writer than to have the latest Nike or pair of shoes or Gucci bag or whatever, so that's what she spent her money on," Blakely says. The prize money funded poetry prizes Brooks created to encourage aspiring poets — especially children. It also took the pressure off people who were trying to write. "There were people she gave rent to, gave car payments to," Blakely remembers. "She gave chunks of money and just said, 'I think this will help.' "

"Kindness was her religion," says Haki Madhubuti, director of Third World Press, in Chicago.

Madhubuti met Brooks in the early '60s, when he was a young veteran writing poetry in Chicago. He'd read her in anthologies while he was in the service. "Like so many young poets at the time, I was in awe of her, her craft and her commitment to the black community." In his early career, Madhubuti was published under his birth name, Don L. Lee. But as a key member of the Black Arts movement — a contingent of artists, playwrights, poets and writers whose work reflected the cultural side of the growing Black Power movement — he chose a name that reflected his African heritage. He and Brooks grew as close as family — she often referred to him as her "other son." She would later say he drew her into this new cultural circle and she felt reborn. Her poetry became more urgent, more pointed.

She, in turn, was celebrated by what she fondly called "the riotous young people" who gathered at her home for long, often passionate discussions about black life, politics and culture. Black cultural celebrities of all sorts came by to visit the Blakelys: They held a party for Langston Hughes that was standing-room only. It was less throw-down, more salon: Ideas were exchanged and vigorously debated over food and drink. "I remember James Baldwin coming through the front door," Nora Blakely says. She remembers Baldwin's large, piercing eyes, "I panicked! I was just a little kid, and his eyes looked so big and commanding to me."

When she taught, Brooks took the summers off, and would retreat into her home to enjoy reading and watching soap operas, rarely venturing out until summer's end. Nora Blakely remembers that after she received her driver's license, her mother sent her off to the grocery store. "Some of her grocery lists were poetry in themselves," she laughs. "She would describe things like 'bright, pearlescent, ruby tomatoes' and so forth, to be very clear about what we were supposed to find." (Those grocery lists are included in Brooks' archives, at the University of Illinois.)

Continue on at NPR, where Grigsby Bates explores Brooks's later career and her global consciousness.