Since his days at Warner Robins High School, James performed in his football role like no other athlete the school had or has ever seen. If not knowing how to read was the secret James Brooks kept, “performing in his football role,” as Jack Brennan of the Cincinnati Bengals said, was something James Brooks, as a player, always made sure you remembered. When asked by the judge how he graduated from Auburn, Brooks said, “I didn’t have to go to class.” James Brooks could not read the court documents this after graduating from Warner Robins High School in Georgia in 1977 and after spending at least four years at Auburn University in Alabama. The “problem” he refers to was the revelation that occurred during a hearing in Judge Steve Martin’s Hamilton County, Ohio, courtroom last month regarding delinquent child support payments in excess of $110,000. She lived in Chicago until her death on December 3, 2000.Auburn University’s and the Cincinnati Bengals’ secret little ‘problem’ unveiled.ĬINcinnati, OHIO - The official statement given via Jack Brennan, public relations director for the Cincinnati Bengals, is: “James Brooks was able to function and perform in his football role while with the Bengals. She also received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the Frost Medal, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 1985, she was the first black woman appointed as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, a post now known as Poet Laureate. In 1968 she was named poet laureate for the state of Illinois. She also wrote numerous other books including a novel, Maud Martha (Harper, 1953), and Report from Part One: An Autobiography (Broadside Press, 1972), and edited Jump Bad: A New Chicago Anthology (Broadside Press, 1971).

She was the author of more than twenty books of poetry, including Children Coming Home (The David Co., 1991) Blacks (The David Co., 1987) To Disembark (Third World Press, 1981) The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems (The David Co., 1986) Riot (Broadside Press, 1969) In the Mecca (Harper & Row, 1968) The Bean Eaters (Harper, 1960) Annie Allen (Harper, 1949), for which she received the Pulitzer Prize and A Street in Bronzeville (Harper & Brothers, 1945). Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, on June 7, 1917, and raised in Chicago.

Bad Book by K.S. Brooks