Phillis Wheatley was the first Black woman to become a poet of note in the United States. She was captured in West Africa and taken to Boston by slave traders in 1761. She was enslaved by a tailor and his wife and received an education, which was unusual for an enslaved person. Wheatley published her first poem in a newspaper when she was 14. Her first book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was published in London in 1773.
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