cade and the influence of the black power movement among African-American writers and thinkers. Her next volume of poetry, In the Mecca (1968), told the bleak story of people living in the Mecca, a large, fortress-like apartment building on the South Side that had deteriorated into a slum. The book clearly displayed Brooks new political awareness, including a poem entitled Malcolm X, after the black militant leader who was assassinated in 1965. In the Mecca was nominated for the National Book Award. It was also the last of Brooks books published by a mainstream publisher, Harper & Row. Her next book, Riot (1969) was published by Broadside Press, a small, black-owned company based in Detroit. With a newly political tone and without a mainstream publisher, Brooks later works often received little attention from the critics at major publications. Nevertheless, she remained a major literary figure throughout the next several decades, publishing more than a dozen volumes of poetry, including Aloneness (1971), To Disembark (1981), The Near-Johannesburg Boy, and Other Poems (1986), Blacks (1987), Winnie (1988), and Children Coming Home (1991). Brooks also published many nonfiction titles, most notably Report from Part One (1972), an assemblage of autobiographical writings, letters, and interviews, and Report from Part Two, published in 1996. In 1968, Brooks succeeded Carl Sandburg as the poet laureate of Illinois. She received a lifetime achievement award from the National Endowment of the Arts in 1989 as well as from the National Book Foundation in 1994. Also in 1994, she was selected by the National Endowment of the Humanities to be its Jefferson Lecturer. She won the National Medal of Arts in 1995 and has received over 50 honorary degrees. Brooks died of cancer on December 3, 2000, at her home in Chicago. She was 83 years old....
