Noah Genatossio is a writer and contributor for blackpast.org, an encyclopedia of global African history. In October 2023, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) announced that it had acquired the largest private collection of pioneering 18th-century author Phillis Wheatley Peters. Born in West Africa in 1753, Peters was taken by slave traders as a kid and brought to what was then the British colonial port town of Boston. She spent most of her life enslaved there, living with John and Susanna Wheatley, and ultimately married a free African-American grocer, John Peters.

Taught to read and write in Boston, Peters began composing expressive poetry at age 14 that found an audience locally and in Great Britain. Her 1772 volume “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral” was published with the support of wealthy abolitionists. Realizing the hypocrisy of keeping her servitude, the Wheatleys’ gave Peters emancipation. However, she did not attain citizenship, and her life remained tumultuous, as she had to take work as a scullery maid and never was able to secure the publishing of a second volume. In addition, she lost her three children, with the third pregnancy causing her death at age 31.

Today, Phillis Wheatley Peters is recognized as the first published African-American writer, and her works are viewed as seminal portrayals of the early black American experience. The collection purchased by the Smithsonian includes magazines and hardcover editions of her works from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. It also includes a four-page autograph manuscript that represents the only copy of the long-lost 1773 poem “Ocean.”