Kidnapped from West Africa as a young child and enslaved in Boston, Phillis Wheatley taught herself to read and write and became, by her early twenties, the first African-born writer and the first Black woman to publish a book of poetry in the English language.
This 1773 collection, spanning faith, mortality and reflections on freedom, startled a world that refused to believe an enslaved girl could have written it. Wheatley’s achievement opened a door that the writers in this very catalogue walked through after her.
