A Voice of Her Own

In 1761, a young girl was sold to the Wheatley family in Boston, who named her Phillis after the slave schooner that had carried her. Kidnapped from her home in Africa and shipped to America, she’d had everything taken from her-her family, her name, and her language.

But Phillis had a passion to learn. Amid the tumult of the Revolutionary War, Phillis Wheatley became a poet and ultimately had a book of verse published, establishing herself as the first African- American woman poet this country had ever known.