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Phillis Wheatley
Poet; first published African American woman
The enslaved girl who wrote her way into the literary canon — and into freedom.
The rise
Born around 1753 in West Africa, likely Senegambia, she was kidnapped, sold and brought to Boston on the slave ship Phillis in 1761. The Wheatley family who bought her taught her to read and write; by her teens she was composing poetry in English and Latin that astonished the colonial establishment.