Phillis Wheatley Peters, also spelled Phyllis and Wheatly was an American author who is considered the first African-American author of a published book of poetry. Born in West Africa, she was kidnapped and subsequently sold into slavery at the age of seven or eight and transported to North America, where she was bought by the Wheatley family of Boston. After she learned to read and write, they encouraged her poetry when they saw her talent.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1773.
Lucy Terry Prince, often credited as simply Lucy Terry (1733–1821), was an American settler and poet. Kidnapped in Africa and enslaved, she was taken to the British colony of Rhode Island. Her future husband purchased her freedom before their marriage in 1756. She composed a ballad poem, "Bars Fight", about a 1746 incident in which two white families were attacked by Native Americans. It was preserved orally until it was published in 1855. It is considered the oldest known work of literature by an African American.
African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. African American writers have been recognized by the highest awards, including the Nobel Prize given to Toni Morrison in 1993. Among the themes and issues explored in this literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African American culture, racism, slavery, and social equality. African-American writing has tended to incorporate oral forms, such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues, or rap.
Scipio Moorhead was an enslaved African-American artist who lived in Boston, Massachusetts. Moorhead is known through the contemporary African-American poet Phillis Wheatley's poem, dedicated "To S. M. a young African Painter, on seeing his Works", published in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, 1773. His full name was learned from period marginalia.
Jupiter Hammon was an American writer who is known as a founder of African-American literature, as his poem published in 1761 in New York was the first by an African American man in North America. He subsequently published both poetry and prose. In addition, he was a preacher and a commercial clerk on Long Island, New York.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon was an English Christian and religious leader who played a prominent part in the religious revival of the 18th century and the Methodist movement in England and Wales. She founded an evangelical branch in England and Sierra Leone, known as the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion.
Martha Wadsworth Brewster was an 18th-century American poet and writer. She is one of only four colonial women who published volumes of their verse before the American Revolution and was the first American-born woman to publish under her own name.
Joseph Green was an American clergyman and poet who published The Disappointed Cooper in 1743, mocking an old man's marriage to a much younger woman as well as criticizing the behavior of some New Light ministers.
Portrait of Phillis Wheatley is a lost painting used as the frontispiece for poet Phillis Wheatley's poetry collection Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, first published in 1773. Wheatley was the United States' first professional African American woman poet and the first African-American woman whose writings were published. She is also the third woman in the United States, regardless of ethnicity, to have her written work published. Copies of the engraving reside in the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library of the Yale University Library, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A. Flowerdew was an English teacher, religious poet and hymnist. Her main work was Poems on Moral and Religious Subjects (1867). She died in 1830.
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is an American poet and novelist, and a professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. She has published five collections of poetry and a novel. Her 2020 collection The Age of Phillis reexamines the life of American poet Phillis Wheatley, based on years of archival research; it was long-listed for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry, and she was the recipient in 2021 of a United States Artists fellowship. HarperCollins published her debut novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, in 2021.
Sarah Parsons Moorhead was an American poet, artist, and polemicist active during the Great Awakening in the 18th century. Her poems critique the itinerant ministers of the Great Awakening and demonstrate the emergence of women's voices during that time.
Obour Tanner, also spelled Abour or Arbour, was an enslaved African woman who lived in Newport, Rhode Island. Tanner was a regular correspondent of poet Phillis Wheatley, and the only correspondent of Wheatley's that was of African descent. Tanner acted as an agent for Wheatley in Newport and made the largest known order of Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in 1773.
