VIrtual Poetry Reading following Awards ceremony for the Knowles Caged Bird Sings Poetry Contest . Award-winning writer Honorée Fanonne Jeffers will discuss and read selections from her latest collection of poetry and prose, The Age of Phillis (2020).  Based on fifteen years of archival research in The Age of Phillis Jeffers, imagines the life and times of Phillis Wheatley Peters: her childhood in the Gambia, West Africa, her life with her white American owners, her friendship with Obour Tanner, and her marriage to the enigmatic John Peters. 

In 1773, a young, African American woman named Phillis Wheatley published a book of poetry that challenged Western prejudices about African and female intellectual capabilities. 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.

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