Gwendolyn Brooks was surrounded and supported by a community of other Black writers like Langston Hughes, (The Negro Speaks of Rivers, Not Without Laughter, The Weary Blues), Haki R. Madhubuti, (Black Culture Centers: Politics of Survival and Identity, Groundwork, YellowBlack), Imamu Amiri Baraka, (A Black Mass, Black Magic, The Revolutionary Theatre) and Richard Wright (Native Son, The Color Curtain, Haiku: This Other World). Growing up, her mother had told her that she would become like the Lady Paul Laurence Dunbar, a late 19th and early 20th century Black American poet and author.

Richard Wright strongly championed Brooks’s work, telling the editors of Harper & Brothers Her 1945 collection of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, which featured poems about Black people in early-to-mid century Chicago:

There is no self-pity here, not a striving for effects. She takes hold of reality as it is and renders it faithfully […] She easily catches the pathos of petty destinies; the whimper of the wounded; the tiny accidents that plague the lives of the desperately poor, and the problem of color prejudice among Negroes. (“Frost? Williams? No, Gwendolyn Brooks”)

Brooks also had a near-lifelong mentorship and friendship with Langston Hughes. Meeting him a teenager, she handed him her manuscript, an act of grit which impressed him tremendously. He wrote about her book A Street in Bronzeville: “This book is just about the biggest little two dollar worth of intriguing reading found in bookshops these atomic days.” (Betsy Schlabach, “The Love Between Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks”)..

Though Brooks was a member of a community and a literary movement that sought racial equality and endeavored to tell the stories of its people, children’s literature hasn’t always been seen as an appropriate medium to do so. “Cynthia in the Snow,” although universally loved, has in some instances been sterilized in interpretation to solely be about the magic of snow, or chastised for including social implications. A 1957 review of Bronzeville Boys and Girls published in Phylon objects to the introduction of “social comment,” suggesting that Brooks’s work is best when “unfettered by social implications” and when it “capture[s] the universal wonder of childhood” (Doris M. King, “The Feeling and Texture of Childness.” Phylon18 (1957): 93-94.). However, it is clear that the poem’s strength lies in its specificity—it is about the experience of being a young Black girl of that time. Scholar Joseph T. Thomas writes:

Certainly this is not a poem that ‘speak[s] for a child of any race’ but instead is a poem speaking for the children of Bronzeville, the disadvantaged children of South Side Chicago, not those of New England, not those of White America generally. (Joseph T. Thomas, Poetry’s Playground; Page 14)

Gwendolyn Brooks’s own thoughts on her work confirm this take on the poem:

A Black poet can only write from the Black experience. What else can they write from? They are Black. Whatever they write, whether it's exclusively about the beauty of flowers or the horrors of war or the deliciousness of a piece of chocolate cake, it's still an expression by a Black . . . and if they try to avoid putting any Blackness in there, it also says something. (B. Denise Hawkins, “An Evening with Gwendolyn Brooks”)