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The Age of Phillis
The Age of Phillis
The Age of Phillis
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The Age of Phillis

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“An arresting and meticulously researched collection of poems” about the life of Phillis Wheatley, the first black woman to publish a book in America (Ms. Magazine).
 
In 1773, a young African American woman named Phillis Wheatley published a book of poetry, Poems on various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). When Wheatley’s book appeared, her words would challenge Western prejudices about African and female intellectual capabilities. Her words would astound many and irritate others, but one thing was clear: This young woman was extraordinary. 

Based on fifteen years of archival research, The Age of Phillis, by award-winning writer Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, imagines the life and times of Wheatley: her childhood with her parents in the Gambia, West Africa, her life with her white American owners, her friendship with Obour Tanner, her marriage to the enigmatic John Peters, and her untimely death at the age of about thirty-three.

Woven throughout are poems about Wheatley's “age”—the era that encompassed political, philosophical, and religious upheaval, as well as the transatlantic slave trade. For the first time in verse, Wheatley’s relationship to black people and their individual “mercies” is foregrounded, and here we see her as not simply a racial or literary symbol, but a human being who lived and loved while making her indelible mark on history.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateFeb 20, 2020
ISBN9780819579515
The Age of Phillis
Author

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a fiction writer, poet, and essayist. She is the author of five poetry collections, including The Age of Phillis, which won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry, was longlisted for a National Book Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Oklahoma.

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A very creative reimagining in poetry of the life of America's first important Black poet Phillis Wheatley who lived during the Revolutionary War period of American History. The author has done a great amount of research and has a twenty page discussion of what she found at the book's end. Her poems include little known facts such a she married a free Black man and gave birth to three children who died in infancy. I teach History and really learned a lot and got a greater appreciation for this wonderful American author.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I have read 9 of the 10 NBA 2020 longlisted books for poetry now--one I have been unable to get my hands on despite having 3 library cards. This is the book that should have won.This book is amazing. It is poetry, but it is also history and psychology and so many other things. Jeffers spent years and years researching the woman known as Phillis Wheatley Peters. She has read secondary work, she has read primary work, she has searched for extant letters, done census research, researched the earliest publications about her. So. Much. Work. This volume consists of Jeffers' own poems on topics in PWP's life--her capture and enslavement, childhood and religion, trips and freedom, marriage and friendships. Her writing, its publication, the people she met and knew well. She also includes poems on other African-Americans living in 18th-century New England. They were most definitely there, and I recognized many (but not all) of their names, and I went down the Wikipedia rabbit hole. Jeffers explains her research and thought processes in prose the last section, Looking for Miss Phillis.This book did not even make the NBA shortlist, and frankly I don't get it. Perhaps they considered it too fact-based, too historical. As a historian, I loved it..

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The Age of Phillis - Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

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