Phillis Wheatley

Phillis Wheatley was born around 1753 in West Africa — most likely in present-day Senegal or Gambia — and trafficked to Boston on the slave ship Phillis in 1761, at approximately seven years of age. She was purchased by John and Susanna Wheatley, who named her for the ship that had brought her and provided her with an education in English, Latin, the Bible, and the major works of British poetry — an exceptional circumstance for any enslaved person in the eighteenth century.

She published her first poem in the Newport Mercury in 1767, at fourteen. Six years later, in 1773, she published Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral — the first book of poetry by an African American and the third book of poetry by an American woman of any background. She traveled to London for the publication and was received by Benjamin Franklin, the Earl of Dartmouth, and the Lord Mayor of London. The Wheatleys manumitted her shortly after her return.

George Washington received her poem "To His Excellency General Washington" in 1776 and invited her to his headquarters in Cambridge to thank her in person. The poem was published in The Pennsylvania Magazine the following month.

She married John Peters, a free Black grocer, in 1778. Their three children all predeceased her. The American Revolution disrupted the literary patronage networks she had depended on; she could not find a publisher for a second volume of her poetry. She died in poverty in Boston on the fifth of December 1784, age approximately thirty-one.

She is honored here as the first African American to publish a book of poetry, and the first woman of African origin to publish in English.