Which poet became the first African American woman to publish a book, in 1773?

Phillis Wheatley became the first African American woman to publish a book in 1773.

Born in West Africa around 1753, Wheatley was kidnapped as a child and brought to Boston, where she was enslaved by the Wheatley family. They taught her to read and write, and she studied classical literature, Christianity, and ancient history.

Her book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was published in London in 1773. It made Wheatley the first African American woman to publish a volume of poetry and one of the earliest published African American authors in English.

Wheatley’s achievement challenged racist assumptions about Black intellectual ability, even though she wrote within the literary and religious conventions of her era. She was emancipated soon after the book’s publication. Her work is associated with the Revolutionary period, but her life also reveals the contradiction between American ideas of liberty and the persistence of slavery.