The girl who was to be named Phillis Wheatley was captured in West Africa in 1761 and taken to Boston by slave traders. She proved to be a precocious child and

William Drummond of Hawthornden was the first notable poet in Scotland to write in English, as well as the first to use the canzone, a medieval Italian metrical

The English novelist Dorothy M. Richardson was a modernist pioneer of stream-of-consciousness fiction. Her novel sequence ‘Pilgrimage’ is an extraordinarily

The first published African American poet, Jupiter Hammon was born into slavery in 1711 on Long Island, New York. Over the years he became a well-respected prea

The first African-American author to be published in the United States, George Moses Horton was famously known as the ‘Slave Poet’. He spent most of his lif