Phillis Wheatley

Phillis Wheatley was born around 1753 in West Africa, most likely in present-day Senegal or the Gambia. As a child of about seven or eight she was seized, carried across the Atlantic on the slave ship Phillis, and brought to Boston on July 11, 1761. There she was purchased by the merchant John Wheatley for his wife, Susanna, and given a name drawn from the very vessel that had borne her into bondage.

Recognizing her extraordinary gifts, the Wheatley household taught her to read and write, and she advanced with remarkable speed, mastering English and studying Latin, Greek, and the classics. She composed her first poems in her early teens. Her verse — elegies, meditations on liberty, and reflections on faith — began to circulate, and in 1773 her collection Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was published in London. With it she became the first African American to publish a book of poetry.

Her book brought her acclaim in both England and the colonies, and by late 1773 the Wheatleys had granted her freedom. In 1778 she married John Peters, a free Black man of Boston. The years that followed were hard: she bore three children, none of whom survived, and she labored to support her family as literary patronage faded amid war and hardship. She died in Boston on December 5, 1784, at about thirty-one years of age.

From a stolen childhood she forged a voice that outlived every chain laid upon her — the first of her people to answer bondage with published poetry, and her words endure still.