Chicago - Gwendolyn Brooks, a poet who grew up in the slums of Chicago in the first half of the 20th century and made history by becoming the first African-American to win a Pulitzer Prize, died on Sunday at 83.
Brooks' influence on US poetry was huge. "At a time when racism was so rampant, Gwendolyn Brooks was almost like a literary Joe Louis," Prof Sterling Plumpp of the departments of African-American Studies and English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said.