Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral

A prominent poet in her own time and now a key figure in the literary canon, Phillis Wheatley was born free in present-day Senegal and Gambia, then enslaved and later freed in the United States. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was a literary sensation and is the first known book of poetry published by a Black woman. It would later help drive the abolitionist cause, as it testified to the intelligence and creativity that many Americans then believed peoples of African descent to lack. Arturo Alfonso Schomburg included this book in the collection that he sold to the Library in 1926, the “seed library” that initiated today’s Schomburg Center collection.