Phillis Wheatley

A young, sickly Phillis Wheatley was brought to Massachusetts as a slave. She grew up in two worlds treated well and educated but still enslaved. In her short life she wrote nearly 150 poems and became the first African-American poet to publish a book. She died alone and in poverty, but her poems live on. They provide a unique perspective on life in colonial America in the late 1700s.