Phillis Wheatley Peters, the first African-American woman to publish a book of poetry, revolutionized American literature with Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). In celebration of her groundbreaking work and to mark its 250th anniversary, Wheatley at 250: Black Women Poets Re-imagine the Verse of Phillis Wheatley Peters brings together 20 Black female poets to reimagine her legacy and voice.
Join Danielle Legros Georges and Artress Bethany White, co-editors of the collection, and Florence Ladd, novelist and poet, as they discuss Wheatley’s impact on the literary world and how her work resonates today. This conversation, moderated by Professor and author Trica Keaton, will explore the transformative power of Wheatley’s words and the ongoing influence of Black women poets across generations.
About the speakers:
Danielle Legros Georges is a writer and editor whose work has been supported by fellowships from organizations including the American Antiquarian Society, the PEN/Heim Translation Fund, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Black Metropolis Research Consortium. Appointed Boston’s Poet Laureate in 2014, she served in the role for four years. Her books include Wheatley at 250: Black Women Poets Re-imagine the Verse of Phillis Wheatley Peters (Pangyrus, 2023); Blue Flare: Three Haitian Poets (Zephyr, 2024); and Three Leaves, Three Roots: Poems on the Haiti-Congo Story (Beacon Press, 2025).
Artress Bethany White is a poet, essayist, and literary critic. Her third poetry collection, A Black Doe in the Anthropocene: Poems, is forthcoming from University Press of Kentucky in spring 2025 and chronicles her family’s history of enslavement in America. She is the recipient of the Trio Award for her poetry collection My Afmerica: poems (Trio House Press, 2019), selected by poet Sun Yung Shin. Her prose, Survivor’s Guilt: Essays on Race and American Identity, received a 2022 Next Generation Finalist Indie Book Award. White is co-editor of the new anthology Wheatley at 250: Black Women Poets Re-imagine the Verse of Phillis Wheatley Peters. She is associate professor of English at East Stroudsburg University.
Florence Ladd is the author of two novels, Sarah’s Psalm and The Spirit of Josephine. She has published two chapbooks: Reclaiming Rose: A Suite of Poems and Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges and His Mother: An Epic. Other poems have been published in The Women’s Review of Books, The Progressive, The Rockhurst Review, Sweet Auburn, Beyond Slavery, Transition, The Golden Shovel Anthology, MUSE, Oberon and Renga for Obama. She co-founded Langston’s Legacy, a collective of poets. For decades, she lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and currently lives in Burgundy.
Trica Keaton is a professor and an interdisciplinary social scientist in the department of African and African American Studies at Dartmouth College with affiliations in the departments of Sociology and Film and Media Studies. Her publications include #You Know You’re Black in France When…: The Fact of Everyday Antiblackness.
