Uploaded March 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
A conversation about Phillis Wheatley’s groundbreaking literary legacy.
Filmed on 25/2/2025 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.
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.
Artress Bethany White, editor of the collection, and Florence Ladd, novelist and poet, discussed Wheatley’s impact on the literary world and how her work resonates today. The event was moderated by Professor and author Trica Keaton.
About the speakers:
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". She is the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at French Institute for Advanced Study/ Iméra-Aix*Marseille Université, France 2024-2025.
Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.
A conversation about Phillis Wheatley’s groundbreaking literary legacy.
Filmed on 25/2/2025 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.
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.
Artress Bethany White, editor of the collection, and Florence Ladd, novelist and poet, discussed Wheatley’s impact on the literary world and how her work resonates today. The event was moderated by Professor and author Trica Keaton.
About the speakers:
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". She is the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at French Institute for Advanced Study/ Iméra-Aix*Marseille Université, France 2024-2025.
Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.
