Lineage and Legacies - 10 Years of the Gwendolyn Brooks Youth Poetry Awards

Young people in Illinois submitted 1,063 poems to this year’s Gwendolyn Brooks Youth Poetry Awards – a record-breaking number in our 10th anniversary year. We are proud of every one of the young people who submitted. Their poems are currently being read by 39 working poets who serve as judges. No matter the outcome of the judging, each one of these young people is now part of the poetry community in Illinois. That is something to celebrate! 

In 2017, Illinois Humanities, in partnership with Brooks Permissions, revived Gwendolyn Brooks’ love letter to young people in Illinois, the Youth Poetry Awards. Gwendolyn Brooks was named Illinois Poet Laureate in 1968 and created the Youth Poetry Awards to encourage young people to write poetry. For all 32 years of her tenure as Illinois Poet Laureate, Gwendolyn Brooks visited schools, led poetry workshops, corresponded with young people, and encouraged them to write. Each year, she accepted submissions, poured over poems, and invited the winners of the Youth Poetry Awards to share their work on stage. She even pulled money out of her own pocket to fund cash prizes. On the 100th anniversary of her mother’s birth, Illinois Humanities brought back the competition as the Gwendolyn Brooks Youth Poetry Awards. 

I wasn’t at Illinois Humanities in 2017; I was still in the classroom working with middle school students. But as the Program Manager of Teaching and Learning and the current lead of the Gwendolyn Brooks Youth Poetry Awards, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to hold the threads between past, present, and future as we mark this 10th anniversary. 

We often think of the present as a given, but we are here because of the choices and commitments of those who came before us. 

In 2013, I was getting ready for my first year as a teacher in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago. That year, the Emanuel administration closed 49 Chicago Public Schools, displacing over 12,000 students. 88% of those students were Black students and 94% of those students were low-income. In Ghosts in the Schoolyard, Eve L. Ewing writes hauntingly about how these closures not only disrupted students’ education but also destabilized neighborhoods. Students were cut off from the community schools their parents and grandparents had attended and shuffled into other buildings. Many of the shuttered schools – Louis Armstrong, Crispus Attucks, Benjamin Banneker, Mary McLeod Bethune, Arna Bontemps, Marcus Garvey, Matthew Hanson, Mahalia Jackson, Robert H Lawrence, Garnet Morgan, Anthony Overton, Jesse Owens, Granville Woods – were named for Black heroes and anchored neighborhoods in Black history.  These losses have stuck with me as an educator and someone who cares about the histories we share with our children. 

I’ve had the privilege of flicking through Ms. Brooks’s photographs held in the Rare Book and Manuscript Archive at the University of Illinois Library, Champaign-Urbana. I saw candids of her with family, snaps of winners at youth poetry ceremonies, and photos from her stops at schools all around the city and state. I paused on a photo from Jenner Elementary in Cabrini-Green in 1989. Jenner is special to me. From 2007 to 2010, I drove a van of Northwestern University undergrads to Holy Family Lutheran Church twice per week to tutor Jenner students in their afterschool program. That experience, guided by community pillars Ms. Jan and Pastor Leslie Hunter, set me on my own journey as an educator. In Ms. Brooks’ photo, the handmade bulletin board over the blackboard proclaims “YOUNG GIFTED ‘N BLACK” as students smile in the foreground. In the next photo, the students are standing, facing a classmate who appears to be sharing aloud. Ms. Brooks sits at the front of the class, holding the space, and giving the young speaker her full attention. 

Because of this work, Illinois Humanities now holds a 10-year archive of youth poetry in our state, comprising over 5,500 poems. 

This collection is a record of what young people have experienced in the last decade: COVID, police brutality, gender violence, climate change, Operation Midway Blitz, incarceration, a future that could be meaner and smaller than what they hope for. But their poems are not simply a record of 10 years of events in Illinois. These youth poets formed meaning from these experiences that are uniquely their own: personal awakenings, wonder in nature, self-love, the beauty of taking care of one another. The immediacy youth poets bring to the page reflects Ms. Brooks’ legacy; she didn’t shy away from the difficult or the complex or the personal. She refused to say something easy when real life was rapping on her door. If Ms. Brooks could turn the pages of this archive as I can, I think she’d be proud of every single young person who looked out at the world and created something meaningful.