Hi Stackers,
Today’s National Poetry Month reading is three poems by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, which I found on poets.org (not poetry.org, as I mistakenly said). I found Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in an anthology called The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Writers, edited by Hollis Robbins and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., though none of the three I read in the recording were in the anthology.
I learned that Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was born 1825 to free parents and was raised by an aunt and uncle after both her parents died, that she was an abolitionist and suffragist, and that she was the first Black woman to publish a short story, in 1859. Wikipedia doesn’t specify “African American woman” or “in America,” but it’s both a remarkable biographical detail to be the first and also a damn shame that it wasn’t until 1859.
Harper also had a successful literary career. Her collection Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854) was a commercial success, making her the most popular African American poet before Paul Laurence Dunbar.[2] Her short story "Two Offers" was published in the Anglo-African in 1859, making literary history as the first short story published by a Black woman.[2]
Harper founded, supported, and held high office in several national progressive organizations. In 1886, she became superintendent of the Colored Section of the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania Women's Christian Temperance Union.[2] In 1896 she helped found the National Association of Colored Women and served as its vice president.[2]
I hope everyone takes a moment to read some of her work and learn more about Frances Ellen Watkins Harper - who was before Paul Laurence Dunbar in popularity when she published in 1854, but I hadn’t heard of until 2025.
The anthology is backordered on Bookshop.org, but there are used copies available at the same link and the ebook is $4.99. You can download a .pdf of her book Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects from the Library of Congress and read it on the Internet Archive - for free.
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