Phillis Wheatley

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Women in Time is a literary biography series about women who lived against the grain of history – and reshaped it. Written with clarity, depth, and emotional precision, each book brings readers into the inner life of a woman who defied the limits of her era, not as an icon, but as a human being in full.

Phillis Wheatley: Stolen, Taught, Freed is the intimate, unsentimental portrait of the first African American woman to publish a book of poetry – while she was still enslaved. In a world that commodified her body, she carved space for her mind. In a house that tried to contain her, she learned to write lines the world could not ignore.

This is not the sanitized story often told in textbooks. It begins not with fame, but with silence – on the floor of a slave ship, where a child who would become a poet first lost her language. Through immersive, emotionally precise chapters, we follow Phillis from her early years in the Wheatley household to her candlelit desk, where her mind begins to shape itself in verse. Her development is shown not as miracle, but as mastery.

She becomes a writer not of polite praise, but of quiet resistance. Her poems offer grace and demand justice – sometimes in the same breath. As her patrons fade and her nation turns toward war, Phillis Wheatley keeps writing. Even in obscurity, even in hunger, she writes.

Included is a powerful bonus chapter, Black Ink in a White Empire – a literary-historical essay that traces how Wheatley navigated the white publishing world, used scripture as strategy, and mastered a language never meant for her. This chapter offers new insight into how she wrote not just against oppression, but within it – with a discipline that still speaks volumes.

This is not just a biography. It is a reckoning with who gets remembered, who gets published, and who gets to write the first sentence.