Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Born in Baltimore in 1825, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper became a poet, lecturer, and reformer whose writing reached wide audiences in the United States. She is remembered for speaking and publishing on abolition, temperance, and woman suffrage, and for bringing those causes into clear, readable poems, essays, and speeches.

Harper wrote across genres, from poetry collections to fiction, and her best-known novel, Iola Leroy, helped secure her place in American literary history. Her work often joined political purpose with deep feeling, centering Black life, faith, justice, and community in a way that still feels direct and alive.

She died in Philadelphia in 1911, but her reputation has only grown. Today she is widely recognized not just as an important reformer, but as a major American author whose words helped shape public debate in her own time.