Abby Epplett, Historian

Yesterday — Monday, October 30, 2023 at 6:00 p.m. — I watched the three-expert panel Bringing Phillis to Life hosted by Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS) at their headquarters in Boston and streamed via Zoom. The talk focused on the life and work of Phillis Wheatley , a colonial American poet who was the third woman, first Black person, a first enslaved person in British North America to publish a book of poetry, called Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral . Each speaker presented for about ten minutes, followed by a twenty minute Q&A. Dr. Tara Bynum, professor at University of Iowa , recently published the book Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America . She spoke in a lyrical style describing surviving letters between Wheatley and her friend, Obour Tanner , another formerly enslaved Black woman who lived in Newport, RI. The letters were written between 1772 and 1779, and they are currently held by MHS , and the story of how they got there ...