Phillis Wheatley

Brought from West Africa to Boston as a child, Phillis Wheatley was enslaved by the Wheatley family and received an unusual literary education. Her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral appeared in London in 1773 after Boston authorities demanded evidence that she had written the poems herself.

Wheatley gained freedom but struggled economically after the Revolution. Her poetry used classical, Christian and political language to assert intellectual authority and to engage questions of liberty, slavery and the emerging American republic. Phillis Wheatley was an enslaved and later free poet whose published work made her one of the earliest internationally recognised African American writers. Phillis Wheatley was born in West Africa and died in Boston, Massachusetts.

Ann Rinaldi’s Hang a Thousand Trees with Ribbons makes Phillis Wheatley the centre of a biographical novel about enslavement, education and the extraordinary scrutiny surrounding her emergence as a published poet in revolutionary Boston. David Hackett Fischer’s African Founders places Wheatley among Black historical actors whose writing, faith and public achievement demonstrate how Africans and their descendants shaped American intellectual and civic life even while living under slavery and racial exclusion.