By: Adeena Syed

She was stolen from her home, sold into slavery, and became the first African-American female author.

There are a lot of great African-Americans whose names are now synonymous with equality, but there are also a lot of great African-Americans who aren’t well known who were trailblazers themselves.  Phillis Wheatley is the first published female African-American poet.

Phillis Wheatley was born in Senegal/Gambia in 1753 and was kidnapped and brought to the United States at the age of eight.

After arriving in the Boston, Massachusetts she was purchased by John Wheatley as a personal slave for his wife Susanna.

Impressed by her intelligence, Susanna began to teach young Phillis how to read. Wheatley wrote her first published poem at the age of thirteen, a story about two men who almost drowned at sea.

Wheatley became famous when her first book titled Poems on Various Subjects, Religion and Moral was published in 1773. Wheatley became the first African-American, first US slave and third American woman to publish a book.

Wheatley was a strong supporter of America’s fight for independence and wrote several poems in honor of George Washington. After she sent one of her poems to Washington, she was invited to visit him in March of 1776.

In 1778, after being freed from slavery due to the death of her owners, Wheatley married a free African-American from Boston named John Peters. Together they had three children-all of whom died during infancy.

The couple lived in poverty, with Wheatley eventually having to take a job as a maid in a boarding house, and had to live in extremely rundown conditions. Eventually, her husband abandoned her after Wheatley got pregnant a third time.

During that time Wheatley continued to write but the growing tensions with the British, which eventually lead to the Revolutionary War, caused her to lose her previous enthusiasm for her poetry. She contacted several publishers, but none would support her second volume of poems.

Wheatley died in 1784 at the age of 31 after giving birth to her third child, who also died. She was buried in an unmarked grave.

Phillis Wheatley is credited as having helped to found African-American literature through her poetry. Some of Wheatley’s poems are: “On Imagination,” “On Being Brought To America,” “Farewell to America,”and “Ode to Neptune.”