Center for the literary arts in New York State
FOUNDING MOTHER: A PHILLIS WHEATLEY CELEBRATION
Wendy Roberts, Cassander L. Smith, and David Waldstreicher
4:30 p.m. Thursday, November 14, 2024
University at Albany
Multi-Purpose Room, Campus Center West
1400 Washington Avenue Albany NY 12222 - See map.
Join us for a wide-ranging discussion about the life and work of Phillis Wheatley (Peters) (1753-1784), a major poet of her era, and the first African American to publish a book of poetry.
Cosponsored by the University at Albany English Department, Young Writers Project, and the Honors College.
Born in West Africa, she was kidnapped and enslaved at the age of 7 or 8, and eventually sold to a Boston merchant. Drawing from classical, religious, and African sources, her poetry engages many of the pressing issues of her time, including the American Revolution, and remains salient today. After the 1773 publication of Poems on Various Subjects, she "became the most famous African on the face of the earth" (Henry Louis Gates, Jr.).
Wendy Roberts, UAlbany English professor and scholar of Early American Literature, received wide attention in 2023 for rediscovering the earliest known full-length elegy by Phillis Wheatley, “On the Death of Love Rotch,” dated 1767, in a Quaker commonplace book at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania while conducting research into Wheatley’s life and legacy.
She is the author of Awakening Verse: The Poetics of Early American Evangelicalism (2020), which received the 2022 Early American Literature Book Award.
Cassander L. Smith, Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama, specializes in African American and Early American Literature.
She is the author of Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic (2023), and Black Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic World (2016). She is also the co-editor of Early American Literature, and of a special issue of that journal, “Dear Sister: Phillis Wheatley (Peters) Studies Now” (Winter 2022).
David Waldstreicher is the author of The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence (2023), a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography.
Tiya Miles, writing in The Atlantic, said, “[An] erudite, enlightening new biography . . . [Waldstreicher’s] interpretations equal Wheatley’s own intentional verse, making it a joy to follow along as he unpacks her words and their arrangement.”
(Photo credit Paula Vlodkowsky)