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Phillis Wheatley is among the very first African American authors. Born in West Africa, she was abducted and transported to the United States of America where she was sold as a slave to a Boston family in 1761. She was eight years old. Phillis proved to be a very bright and precocious child who learned to speak, read and write English in record time. Encouraged to expand her learning activities by Mrs Wheatley, she gained an extraordinary education and began writing poetry. Her poems are a testimony to her familiarity with all the writing and ideas of the leading intellectuals of her time. A compilation of her work was published in 1773 in London — as no American publisher accepted to print a book written by a Black slave — under the title Poems on various subjects, religious and moral.
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