By the time she had graduated from high school in 1935, she was already a regular contributor to The Chicago Defender.Īfter her early educational experiences, Brooks did not pursue a four-year college degree because she knew she wanted to be a writer and considered it unnecessary. Her first poem was published in American Childhood when she was 13.

Over time, this experience helped her understand the prejudice and bias in established systems and dominant institutions, not only in her own surroundings but in every relevant American mindset.īrooks began writing at an early age and her mother encouraged her, saying, 'You are going to be the lady Paul Laurence Dunbar.' During her teenage years, she began filling books with ''careful rhymes'' and ''lofty meditations,' as well as submitting poems to various publications. Brooks then attended a prestigious integrated high school in the city with a predominantly white student body, Hyde Park High School transferred to the all-black Wendell Phillips High School and finished her schooling at integrated Englewood High School.Īccording to biographer Kenny Jackson Williams, due to the social dynamics of the various schools, in conjunction with the era in which she attended them, Brooks faced much racial injustice. She started her formal education at Forestville Elementary School on Chicago's South Side. She would closely identify with Chicago for the rest of her life.

When Brooks was six weeks old, her family moved to Chicago during the Great Migration, and from then on, Chicago remained her home.

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