In 1765, when Phillis Wheatley was about eleven years old, she wrote a letter to Reverend Samson Occum, a Mohegan Indian and an ordained Presbyterian minister. Despite the difference in their ages ...

Then, she was not Phyllis Wheatley at all, but a young West African ... In 1778, Phyllis married a free black man, John Peters. Her literary output slowed – the couple’s living conditions ...

Invoking Emily Dickinson, Phillis Wheatley, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Sam Cornish and Robert Frost, Gov. Maura Healey on Monday signed an executive order creating a position of poet laureate in ...