Phillis Wheatley

Phillis Wheatley frontispiece

To mark the beginning of Women’s History Month, which follows on the heels of African American History Month, From the Catbird Seat would like to recognize Phillis Wheatley’s major impact on both literary history and women’s history. In 1773, Wheatley became the first African American woman to publish a book. Wheatley’s book, a volume of …

Not until the end of the 20th century did scholars begin to look at early African American print culture in the depth it deserves. A story painfully intertwined with the transatlantic slave system and racism, early black print engagement combined, from its beginnings, responses to white aggression and a powerful set of individual and communal desires to read about, record, and, via print, share truths of black life in the United States. Some of the first creators of black print in the United…

Virginia Woolf Matron Saint of Writers B. 1882, England Feast Day: January 25 On a crisp October morning at “Oxbridge,” a woman crosses the grass. She has had an idea that excites her, and she is l…

Phillis Wheatley Peters was born in West Africa in 1753. At the age of eight, she was kidnapped, enslaved in New England, and sold to John Wheatley of Boston. The first African-American and one of the first women to publish a book of poetry in the colonies, Wheatley learned to read and write English by the age of nine, familiarizing herself with Latin, Greek, the Bible, and selected classics at an early age. She began writing poetry at thirteen, modeling her work on the English poets of the…

December 21, 1767: Phillis Wheatley, fourteen, becomes the first published African American poet.

And how they shaped your city.

SAAM's education resources use artworks as invitations to explore historical eras, literary themes, and connections to the present day. Contextualized within the people, movements, and stories of the United States, these artworks provide rich opportunities to uncover complexities and perspectives and put new knowledge to use.