Phillis Wheatley is the earliest known Black woman poet. (original birth-name unknown) She was born somewhere in West Africa in 1753. From the manifest of the ship that brought her here, we know: "Phillis was kidnapped at the age of eight and was taken to America where she was sold in Boston to the Wheatley family. Here she became the enslaved servant of her owner’s wife; Susanna Wheatley."

The origins of her name are a combination of the boat she had been sold from; the ‘Phillis’ and the owners’ family name ‘Wheatley.’

Unlike most slaves, the family that enslaved Phillis also educated her–in English, Greek and Latin. She wrote her first poem at aged 14, entitled ‘To the University of Cambridge, In New England.’

She was freed at age 20, and accompanied the son of the Wheatleys to London for his studies. She began to get her poems published, which would likely never happen in the U.S. In 1789, after her death at age 36, one of her poems about her plight as a slave was published by a London newspaper;