Phillis Wheatley

Phillis Wheatley was the first published African-American female poet. She was born in the middle of the eighteenth century, possibly in areas in or around Senegal. Captured around the age of seven, she was sold to a distinguished Bostonian family as a domestic slave. As was the tradition those days, the family renamed her Phillis after the slave ship that brought her, also giving her their surname Wheatley. However, unlike other slaveholders, they gave her education and encouraged her to write poetry. Very soon, she became a part of the household and the family took active interest in publishing her only book, ‘Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral’, setting her free shortly thereafter. Unfit for any hard job, her life after the death of her benefactors was spent in poverty. Working as a charwoman, she continued to write, but could not publish her second collection of poems for want of subscriptions. The poet, who had been invited by George Washington for poetry reading, died alone and uncared for in a boarding house among abject poverty, at the age of thirty-one.