Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

For poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, as for the Black Romantics, history is the repetition of anti-Black violence that has yet to be abolished.

For decades, a white woman’s memoir shaped our understanding of America’s first Black poet. Does a new book change the story?

A new biography of Phillis Wheatley places her in her era and shows the ways she used poetry to criticize the existence of slavery.