Elizabeth Barrett Browning was an English poet of the Victorian era, popular in Britain and the United States during her lifetime and frequently anthologised after her death. Her work received renewed attention following the feminist scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s, and greater recognition of women writers in English. Born in County Durham, the eldest of 12 children, Elizabeth Barrett wrote poetry from the age of eleven. Her mother's collection of her poems forms one of the largest extant collections of juvenilia by any English writer. At 15, she became ill, suffering intense head and spinal pain for the rest of her life. Later in life, she also developed lung problems, possibly tuberculosis. She took laudanum for the pain from an early age, which is likely to have contributed to her frail health.
Angelina Weld Grimké was an African-American journalist, teacher, playwright, and poet.
Robert Gould Shaw was an American officer in the Union Army during the American Civil War. Born into an abolitionist family from the Boston upper class, he accepted command of the first all-black regiment in the Northeast. Supporting the promised equal treatment for his troops, he encouraged the men to refuse their pay until it was equal to that of white troops' wage.
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was an American poet, author, and teacher. Her work often dealt with the personal celebrations and struggles of ordinary people in her community. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry on May 1, 1950, for Annie Allen, making her the first African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize.
African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. Olaudah Equiano was an African man who wrote The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, an autobiography published in 1789 that became one of the first influential works about the transatlantic slave trade and the experiences of enslaved Africans. His work was published sixteen years after Phillis Wheatley's work. She was an enslaved African woman who became the first African American to publish a book of poetry, which was published in 1773. Her collection, was titled Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.
Lucille Clifton was an American poet, writer, and educator from Buffalo, New York. From 1979 to 1985 she was Poet Laureate of Maryland. Clifton was a finalist twice for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
Naomi Long Madgett was an American poet and publisher. Originally a teacher, she later found fame with her award-winning poems and was also the founder and senior editor of Lotus Press, established in 1972, a publisher of poetry books by black poets. Known as "the godmother of African-American poetry", she was the Detroit poet laureate since 2001.
Sarah Lee Brown Fleming was an American educator, social and community activist, playwright, poet, novelist, and the first African-American teacher in the Brooklyn school system.
Anne Bethel Spencer was an American poet, teacher, civil rights activist, librarian, and gardener. She was a prominent figure of the Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement, despite living in Virginia for most of her life, far from the center of the movement in New York. She met Edward Spencer while attending Virginia Seminary in Lynchburg, Virginia. Following their marriage in 1901, the couple moved into a house he built at 1313 Pierce Street, where they raised a family and lived for the remainder of their lives.
Josephine Lyons Scott Pinckney was a novelist and poet in the literary revival of the American South after World War I. Her first best-selling novel was the social comedy Three O'clock Dinner (1945).
Caroline Lee Whiting Hentz was an American novelist, most noted for her defenses of slavery and opposition to the abolitionist movement. Her widely read The Planter's Northern Bride (1854) was one of the genre known as anti-Tom novels, by which writers responded to Harriet Beecher Stowe's bestselling anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852).
Marilyn Nelson is an American poet, translator, biographer, and children's book author. She is a professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut, and the former Poet Laureate of Connecticut. She is a winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, and the Frost Medal. From 1978 to 1994, she published under the name Marilyn Nelson Waniek. She is the author or translator of more than twenty books and five chapbooks of poetry for adults and children. While most of her work deals with historical subjects, in 2014 she published a memoir, named one of NPR's Best Books of 2014, entitled How I Discovered Poetry.
Eloise Greenfield was an American children's book and biography author and poet famous for her descriptive, rhythmic style and positive portrayal of the African-American experience.
Frances Anne Rollin Whipper was a political activist, teacher, and author. Whipper and her four sisters were socially and politically active within the South Carolina state government during the Reconstruction era. In 1867, she won one of the earliest Civil Rights lawsuits for being denied first class passage on a steamship traveling between Beaufort and Charleston, South Carolina. Whipper wrote and published the biography of the abolitionist, nationalist, and highest ranking Black commissioned officer in the Union army, Martin R. Delany (1812-1885). Published under the name Frank A. Rollin in 1868, The Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany, was the first full-length biography written by an African American. Whipper's 1868 diary, one of the earliest known diaries by a southern Black woman, details her social and intellectual activities in Boston, as well as her courtship and early months of marriage to William James Whipper, a member of the South Carolina legislature and proponent of women's suffrage.
Marjory Heath Wentworth is an American poet. She was named by Governor Mark Sanford as the sixth South Carolina Poet Laureate in 2003.
Helen von Kolnitz Hyer was an American poet. She was named by Governor John C. West as the second South Carolina Poet Laureate from 1974 to 1983.
Anna Hempstead Branch was an American poet. She was regarded as a major poet during her life, labeled by William Thomas Stead "the Browning of American poetry".
Effie Lee Newsome (1885–1979), born Mary Effie Lee in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was a Harlem Renaissance writer. She mostly wrote children's poems, and was the first famous African-American poet whose work was mostly in this area. She edited a column in The Crisis from 1925 until 1929, called "The Little Page", where she made drawings and wrote poetry for children and parables about being young and black in the 1920s. Newsome also illustrated for children's magazines and edited children's columns for Opportunity.
Warsan Shire is a British writer, poet, editor, and teacher who was born to Somali parents in Kenya. In 2013, she was awarded the inaugural Brunel University African Poetry Prize.
Mary Berkeley Minor Blackford was an American anti-slavery activist, founder of the Female Auxiliary of the American Colonization Society in Fredericksburg.
