WHEATLEY, PHILLIS (aka Phillis Wheatley Peters, sometimes spelled Phyllis or Wheatly, c. 1753–5 December 1784), the first published African American woman in North America. Wheatley was sold into slavery when she was about seven years old and transported from West Africa—most likely near modern-day Senegal and Gambia—to the British American colonies, where she was purchased by the prominent Boston merchant John Wheatley for his wife Susanna. The Wheatley family taught the young Phillis Wheatley how to read and write and encouraged her poetry. In 1773, the publication of her first collection of poems was highly praised both in England and in the colonies, including by figures like George Washington, who wrote her a letter commending her work on February 28, 1776.
Although Phillis Wheatley is widely known by name, the full embodied history of her life has remained obscure. For example, despite the fact that the Wheatley family manumitted her after the publication of her book, in 1773, they had previously kept her in slavery even as she was being presented on tours as a Black genius.
Susanna Wheatley died in the spring of 1774, and John died just four years later. Following their deaths, Phillis married a free Black man, John Peters, and continued to write and publish, though on a limited scale. Her calls for public funding to publish the second volume of her poems were fruitless, and after her husband was imprisoned for debt in 1784, she became ill and died at the age of thirty-one, uncared for and alone. Wheatley’s poetry and literary writing no doubt served as a catalyst for early antislavery and abolitionist movements, as well as contemporary African American literature, but her recent prominence has sparked interest in deeper examinations of her importance—including a debate among Black scholars and historians about the meaning of racial identity and the weight significant figures carry in constructing narratives of memory and remembering.