writer to win the Pulitzer Prize with Annie Allen which tells the story of a black woman's passage from childhood to adulthood, against a backdrop of poverty and discrimination. In Saturday Review of Literature, Starr Nelson proclaimed the collection: "a work of art and a poignant social document." and Langston Hughes commented: "the people and poems in Gwendolyn Brooks' book are alive, reaching, and very much of today." After attending the Second Black Writers' Conference at Fisk University in 1967, Brooks' work took a more overtly political stance and shows a deepening concern with social problems. Toni Cade Bambara wrote in the New York Times Book Review that "something happened to Brooks, a something most certainly in evidence in In the Mecca and subsequent works -- a new movement and energy, intensity, richness, power of statement and a new stripped lean, compressed style. A change of style prompted by a change of mind." In the seventies, Brookes left the major publishing house Harper & Row, in favour of new Black publishing companies -- although this should not be taken as a sign that her work was universally acclaimed by its Black readership. Her autobiography Report from Part One (1972) did not provide the insight that some reviewers had expected -- prompting Brooks to reply: "They wanted a list of domestic spats." Other critics praised the book for explaining the poet's new orientation toward her racial heritage and her role as a poet. Gwendolyn Brooks was sixty-eight when she became the