Gwendolyn Brooks' poetry illustrated paramount political consciousness, especially the vigor for the civil rights movement in the 1960s. In fact, several of her books of poetry reflected the civil rights movement. She held a strong commitment to racial identity and equality in addition to her highly regarded mastery of poetic techniques. Her poetry is considered to be the transition between the academic poetry of the 1940s to the militant poetry of the 1960s.

Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, but her family moved shortly after her birth to Chicago, Illinois. Her father was a janitor who aspired to be a doctor, and her mother was a schoolteacher and classically trained pianist. She published her first poem at 13 years old, which was called "Eventide." At 17 years old, she started publishing poems regularly in the Chicago Defender -- a newspaper that served Chicago's Black population. After attending junior college and working for the NAACP, she developed her craft in writing poetry. Thus, she began writing poems that focused on the urban Black population, as demonstrated by her book of poetry A Street in Bronzeville.

Gwendolyn Brooks wrote one novel entitled Martha Maude. It follows the character Martha, a young Black woman, on her growth through life. Martha's concern is not only how she fits in the world but if she is perceived as ugly. Martha faces discrimination by lighter-skinned Black people because she is so dark, which progresses her insecurity. However, the message of her novel is described as a call to "accept the challenge of being human and to assert humanness with urgency."

Brooks decided to leave the large publishing house Harper Row because she was more interested in helping and encouraging smaller publishing houses. She was dawn more to the independent publishing houses that catered to the needs of the Black community. However, her switch in publishers led to a decline in reviews by critics because they did not want to encourage the rising phenomenon of "Black publishes." Contrasting starkly to the critics' original praise of Brooks' political awareness, the critics expressed distaste towards the political content in the poems published by the "Black publishers."