Phillis Wheatley, also spelled Phyllis and Wheatly was the first African-American woman to publish a book of poetry. Born in West Africa, she was sold into slavery at the age of seven or eight and transported to North America. She was purchased by the Wheatley family of Boston, who taught her to read and write and encouraged her poetry when they saw her talent.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was an abolitionist, suffragist, poet, teacher, public speaker, and writer, one of the first African American women to be published in the United States.
Stephen Vincent Benét was an American poet, short story writer, and novelist. He is best known for his book-length narrative poem of the American Civil War John Brown's Body (1928), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and for the short stories "The Devil and Daniel Webster" (1936) and "By the Waters of Babylon" (1937). In 2009, The Library of America selected his story "The King of the Cats" (1929) for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American Fantastic Tales edited by Peter Straub.
Rita Frances Dove is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position (1937–86). Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006.
John Codrington Warwick Bampfylde or Bampfield was an 18th-century English poet. He came from a prominent Devon family, his father being Sir Richard Bampfylde, 4th Baronet, and was educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He had financial problems, he had made romantic advances to Mary Palmer, niece of Joshua Reynolds, which she had refused, and he spent the latter part of his life in a psychiatric hospital in London. He died of tuberculosis.
Carolyn Forché is an American poet, editor, professor, translator, and human rights advocate. She has received many awards for her literary work.
John Pierpont was an American poet, who was also successively a teacher, lawyer, merchant, and Unitarian minister. His most famous poem is The Airs of Palestine.
James Vincent Tate was an American poet. His work earned him the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He was a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
John Hollander was an American poet and literary critic. At the time of his death, he was Sterling Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University, having previously taught at Connecticut College, Hunter College, and the Graduate Center, CUNY.
Craig Arnold was an American poet and professor. His first book of poems, Shells (1999), was selected by W. S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. His many honors include the 2005 Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellowship in literature, The Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, an Alfred Hodder Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, an NEA fellowship, and a MacDowell Fellowship.
David William Blight is the Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Previously, Blight was a professor of History at Amherst College, where he taught for 13 years. He has won several awards, including the Bancroft Prize and Frederick Douglass Prize for Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, and the Pulitzer Prize and Lincoln Prize for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.
Ann Plato was a 19th-century Black educator and author. She was the second woman of color to publish a book in America and the first to publish a book of essays and poems. As a young Black girl writing in the 19th century, Plato has been described as an heir to Phillis Wheatley, who wrote her first published poem at the age of 13 in 1766. There is not much biographical information on Plato, and most of her life is known from her only published work, Essays, which included the preface written by Reverend James W. C. Pennington, an abolitionist leader in Hartford, Connecticut, and a pastor.
David Brion Davis was an American intellectual and cultural historian, and a leading authority on slavery and abolition in the Western world. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, and founder and director of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.
Jupiter Hammon, a founder of African-American literature, was born into slavery in 1711 at the Lloyd Manor on Long Island, New York. In 1761 Hammon published his first poem, "An Evening Thought. [sic] Salvation by Christ with Penitential Cries," and at the age of forty-nine became the first African American poet published in North America. Hammon was a well-known and well respected Christian slave preacher and clerk-bookkeeper which aided in the wide circulation of his slavery poems. As a devoted Christian evangelist, Hammon used his biblical foundation to publicly launch an assault against the institution of slavery.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Annie Finch is an American poet. Her books include the poetry volumes Eve, Calendars, Among the Goddesses, and Spells: New and Selected Poems, the essay collection The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self, and the writing guide A Poet's Craft. She has also published poetry criticism and poetry translation and edited a number of anthologies.
Homoerotic poetry is a genre of poetry implicitly dealing with same-sex romantic or sexual interaction. The male-male erotic tradition encompasses poems by major poets such as Abu Nuwas, Michelangelo, Walt Whitman, Federico García Lorca, W. H. Auden, Fernando Pessoa and Allen Ginsberg. In the female-female tradition, authors may include those such as Sappho, "Michael Field", "Marie-Madeleine" and Maureen Duffy. Other poets wrote poems and letters with homoerotic overtones toward individuals, such as Emily Dickinson to her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert.
George Bradley is an American poet, editor, and fiction writer whose work is characterized by formal structure, humor, and satirical narrative.
Professor James G. Basker is an American scholar, writer, and educational leader.
The Dying Negro: A Poetical Epistle was a 1773 abolitionist poem published in England, by John Bicknell and Thomas Day. It has been called "the first significant piece of verse propaganda directed explicitly against the English slave systems". It was quoted in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano of 1789.
