Imagine being the best-known and also the first African-American woman to publish a book of poetry at the age of 13, while also being a slave.

This is her story.

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Phillis Wheatley was the first African-American and second female to publish a book of poems. And she was also the youngest.

Phillis Wheatley was born on May 8th, 1753, in Gambia, West Africa. There's no record of her real birth name. 

When she was no younger than seven, she was kidnapped by slave traders and brought to America in 1761. The slave traders renamed her 'Phillis' based off the slave ship 'The Phillis'

She was transported to the Boston docks with a shipment of "refugee" slaves who, because of their age or physical frailty, were unsuited for rigorous labor in the West Indian and Southern Colonies. They were the first ports of call after the Atlantic crossing.

In August 1761, Susanna Wheatley, the wife of Boston tailor John Wheatley, was "in want of a domestic."

Which I believe is another term for "house slave'. 

Susanna purchased "a slender, frail female child...for a trifle."

The captain of the slave ship believed that Phillis was terminally ill, and he wanted to make at least a small profit off of her before she died. 

It's reported that a Wheatley relative surmised her to be "of slender frame and evidently suffering from a change of climate," "nearly naked, with no other covering than a quantity of dirty carpet about her," and "about seven years old...from the circumstances of shedding her front teeth."

When Phillis was sold to the Wheatley family, she adopted their last name and was taken under Susanna's wing as her "domestic.

During her time serving the Wheatleys, which was about sixteen months, Susanad discovered that Phillis had an extraordinary capacity to learn. The Wheatleys, including their son Nathaniel and their daughter MaryMary,ght her how to read and write after discovering her precociousness.

But this didn't excuse her from her duties as a house slave.

Phillis was soon immersed in the Bible, astronomy, geography, history, theology, British literature, and the Greek and Latin classics of Virgil, Ovid, Terence, and Homer. Inspired, she began writing poetry between the ages of 12 and 13.

At a time when African Americans were discouraged and intimidated from learning how to read and write, Phillis' life was an anomaly.

When she started to publish her poems, her fame and talent soon spread across the Atlantic. With Susanna's support, Phillis started posting advertisements for subscribers for her first book of poems.

However, a scholar of Phillis's work, Sondra O'Neale, notes, "When the colonists were apparently unwilling to support literature by an African, she and the Wheatleys turned in frustration to London for a publisher."

In 1773, Phillis was in continuously poor health; she had chronic asthma. But she sets off for London with Nathaniel Wheatley, her master's son.  

When she arrived in London, she was accepted and adored for both her poise and her literary work. And during her time there, she also received medical treatment for the ailments she was battling.

She met Selina Hastings, a friend of Susanna Wheatley and the Countess of Huntingdon. Eventually, Hastings funded the publication of Phillis's book. "Poems on various Subjects, Religious and Moral." Was the first book of poetry published by an enslaved African American in the United States. 

Her book includes many elegies as well as poems on Christian themes, even dealing with race, such as the often-anthologized "On being brought from Africa to America."

Phillis was also a strong supporter of America's fight for independence; she penned several of her poems in honor of George Washington, who was Commander of the Continental Army. She sent him one of her works that was written in 1775, and it eventually inspired an invitation to visit him in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She visited Washington in March 1776.

 Phillis eventually had to return to Boston to tend to Susanna Wheatley, who was gravely ill. 

After the elder Wheatleys died, Phillis was left with nothing and had to support herself as a seamstress. 

It's unclear when she was freed by the Wheatleys, but scholars suggest that she was freed between 1774 and 1778. And during that time, most of the Wheatley family had died.

Even with her literary popularity at its all-time high and being manumitted, freedom in 1774 Boston proved to be incredibly difficult.

Phillis was unable to secure funding for another publication or even sell her writing. 

In 1778, she was married to a free African American man from Boston named John Peters. They had three children, but none of them survived infancy.

Their marriage proved to be a struggle due to the couple's battle with constant poverty. Phillis was then forced to find work as a maid in a boarding house,where she lived in squalid, horrifying conditions.

Even through all her misfortune, Phillis continued to write. But, with the growing tensions with the British and the Revolutionary War, she lost enthusiasm for her poems.

Although she continued to contact various publishers, she was unsuccessful in finding support for a second volume of poetry.

On December 5th, 1784, Phillis Wheatley died alone in a boarding house at 31 years old, without a penny to her name.

Many of her poems for her second volume disappeared and have never been recovered.