Imagine being an enslaved teenager forced into a Boston room full of governors, founding fathers, and the wealthiest merchants of the era to legally prove that your own mind belongs to you. In 1772, that is exactly what Phillis Wheatley had to do. This episode is a deep dive into the first published African American poet, the impossible paradox of her life, and the literary Trojan horse she built inside the most elite verse forms of her age.

We trace her path: kidnapped from West Africa as a child, sold in Boston to the Wheatley family, taught Greek and Latin, and writing publishable elegies and Pindaric odes by her teens. We unpack the 1772 attestation, an 18-signature panel of Boston's most powerful men endorsing that the poems were really hers, and the 1773 London publication of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral that  ...