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The Lives, Writings and Legacies of Phillis Wheatley Peters

Edited by Barbara McCaskill, Sarah Ruffing Robbins and Mona Narain

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Published 31 October 2026

About this book

Rethinks the life, writings and legacies of Phillis Wheatley Peters in a global context from the eighteenth century to the contemporary period

  • Considers transatlantic and international networks and ideas that influenced PWP’s poetry and informed the circulation of her writings to antislavery audiences in the US, Caribbean and UK after her death
  • Reflects on the afterlives of Wheatley and her works in contemporary print and online exhibits, memorials and performances in the US and UK
  • Evaluates underdiscussed and newly recovered aspects of Wheatley Peters’s life—her experience in the Middle Passage, her ties to Black communities, her marriage to John Peters and her entrepreneurial acumen in freedom
  • Presents original, provocative readings of her poetry informed by new directions in the study of (pre-)Revolutionary American history, transatlantic slavery and religion and evolving ideas about race in classical literature

This volume focuses on the legacy and relevance of poet Phillis Wheatley Peters in biography, literary criticism and public humanities scholarship. Contributors draw from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century manuscripts, editions and broadsides, and twentieth- and twenty-first century memorials, literary works and print and online exhibits, as well as community programming. Major themes are community and collaboration, Wheatley’s transatlantic travels and alliances, her contributions to global Black print culture and how her memory and art have animated individual and collective expressions of sisterhood, African Diasporic culture and joy. Contributors address omissions, silences and gaps in her life and poetry through plausible, authentic re-imaginings of her marriage, childhood, interactions with white patrons and affiliations with African American and Afro-British abolitionists and friends.

Reviews

There has never been a better time to be a scholar of Phillis Wheatley Peters, as this extraordinary volume shows. The Lives, Writings and Legacies of Phillis Wheatley Peters is a tribute to the genius and enduring power of one of our greatest poets.

While my research in Black Women Legacies reveals that Phillis Wheatley was the most memorialised Black woman of the Jim Crow era, this body of work showcases that her legacy continues to make an indelible imprint in the twenty-first century.

Expanding the biographical context of her life, the exploration of her poetry, and the examination of her public legacy – which comprise the three parts of this volume – deepen our understanding of Phillis Wheatley Peters’ humanity. Delving into her interiority, or the layered dimensions of her personhood, the scholars in this volume provide current and future generations with insight about the woman behind her time-stamped accolade as the first Black person in the United States to publish a book.

The essays in this volume are curated to reveal a behind-the-scenes perspective of historians scouring the archives, how artists have shaped their public expressions of her legacies, and literary scholars determined to excavate the implications of her poetry during the era in which she lived and for audiences of today.

Readers will walk away with a full picture of who Phillis Wheatley Peters was as a person, as well as an invitation to celebrate the relevancy of her eighteenth-century legacy in our contemporary world. As the scope of ‘Wheatley Studies’ continues to expand, this anthology will be an essential read for casual enthusiasts and scholars alike.

Table of contents

List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Co-editors and Contributors
Note on Our Editing Patterns

Introduction: Phillis Wheatley Peters as Cultural Touchstone
Sarah Ruffing Robbins, Barbara McCaskill and Mona Narain

Part I. Representing Life Experiences
Lead section editor: Sarah Ruffing Robbins
1. Wheatley’s Black Women Literary Predecessors
Cassander L. Smith
2. Lore and Longing in Two Biographical Versions of Phillis Wheatley
Sarah Ruffing Robbins
3. Searching for Phillis Wheatley Peters
Vincent Carretta
4. Phillis Wheatley Peters, Diplomat
Hollis Robbins and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
5. Finding a Face for Phillis: Portraying Phillis Wheatley Peters in Sculpture
Meredith Bergmann
6. Staging Wheatley Peters: An Interview
Ade Solanke with the Volume’s Co-editors

Part II. Literary Criticism
Lead section editor: Mona Narain
7. Snatching the Laurel: or, Transgressing the Limits of Literary Patronage in the Eighteenth Century James Edward Ford III
8. The Blood of Christians: Phillis Wheatley and White Christianity
Kimberly Anne Coles
9. Wheatley and the Spiritual Stakes of Transatlantic Movement
David Mark Diamond
10. Phillis and the Oceans
Mona Narain
11. “Suspend the Sigh, dear Sir”: Politics of Voice and Address in Two Elegies by Phillis Wheatley Peters
Katarina Stenke
12. With and Without Her: Placing Phillis Wheatley Peters’s Poems “On the Death of Love Rotch” and “The Black Rose”
Wendy Raphael Roberts

Part III. Afterlives and Communities
Lead section editor: Barbara McCaskill
13. Embodied Archives and Revived Legacies in Favored by the Muses: A Multidisciplinary, Research-Based Performance
George Contini
14. Wake Work and the Afterlives of Phillis Wheatley’s Poetry
drea brown
15. Copies, Collections, Communities: Wheatley’s Poems on Display in St Andrews
Jahzel Asi, Elizabeth Henderson and Tom Jones
16. Phillis Wheatley’s Legacy in Five Objects
Brigitte Fielder and Jonathan Senchyne
17. Power to the People: Mary Church Terrell and Margaret Walker Alexander Reclaim the Poet Phillis Wheatley Peters
Barbara McCaskill and Seretha D. Williams
18. “Midwife to a Movement”: Margaret Walker, Literary Foremother, and the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival at Jackson State University
Ebony Lumumba and Robert Luckett

Bibliography
Index

About the contributors

Barbara McCaskill

Barbara McCaskill is Distinguished Research Professor of English and a faculty affiliate of Women’s Studies and African American Studies at the University of Georgia. She is also Associate Academic Director of the Willson Center for Humanities & Arts. In 2023, she co-organized 'The Genius of Phillis Wheatley Peters' public humanities project with Sarah Ruffing Robbins and Mona Narain. She has authored, edited or co-edited numerous books on African American and Ethnic American Literature, including African American Literature in Transition, 1880-1900 with Caroline Gebhard (forthcoming 2026); The Magnificent Rev. Peter Thomas Stanford with Sidonia Serafini (2020) and her monograph, Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery: William and Ellen Craft in Culture Memory (2015). She serves as co-P.I. with Nicholas Allen of Culture and Community at the Penn Center National Historic Landmark District, a multi-year, multi-institutional grant consisting of student residencies, community fellows, an artist-in-residence, and public conversations, and funded by the Mellon Foundation.

Sarah Ruffing Robbins

Sarah Ruffing Robbins is Lorraine Sherley Professor of English at Texas Christian University. She co-directed 'The Genius of Phillis Wheatley Peters' public humanities project with Barbara McCaskill and Mona Narain and oversees the project website. Her current book projects include a monograph on public humanities in action that uses cultural memory-making around Wheatley Peters across time as a case study. She has published a dozen academic books and led numerous grant-funded public humanities projects. Her single-author books include Learning Legacies: Archive to Action through Women’s Cross-Cultural Teaching (2017); The Cambridge Introduction to Harriet Beecher Stowe (2007); and the Choice Award-winning Managing Literacy, Mothering America (2004). With historian Ann Pullen, she co-edited the award-winning critical edition of Nellie Arnott’s Writings on Angola (2011). She co-edited Transatlantic Anglophone Literatures, 1776-1920 (EUP, 2022) with Linda Hughes and Andrew Taylor and Teaching Transatlanticism (EUP, 2015) with Hughes; she has directed a companion website for those pedagogy-focused publications, Teaching Transatlanticism. With Andrew Taylor and Christopher Hanlon, she co-edits Edinburgh University Press’s 'Interventions in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture' book series.

Mona Narain

Mona Narain is Professor of English at Texas Christian University and a faculty affiliate in Asian Studies and Women & Gender Studies. She specialises in British literature of the long eighteenth-century (1660-1830) and British Asian Literature, (Post) Colonial Studies, and the literatures of Diasporas and the Global South. She is the Scholarship Editor of ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1660-1830, and book series co-editor of 'Transits: Literature, Culture and Thought, 1650-1850'. Her current research focuses on oceanic connections between the Global South, the Black Atlantic, and colonialism. Other select publications include a journal special issue on 'Asians/Asia: Provocations' and 'Postcolonial Revisions of the Early Modern'; a co-edited book, Gender and Space in British Literature, 1660-1820 (2014); an essay on British Indian writers in The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing (2020); and several peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals such as ELH, Studies in Romanticism and Literature Compass. She serves on the advisory boards of the journal Eighteenth Century Fiction and the 'Early Modern Feminisms' books series.