Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Born free in Baltimore on September 24, 1825, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper became one of the first Black women in the United States to publish widely. She was a poet, fiction writer, lecturer, and teacher whose career stretched across decades of enormous change in American life.

Harper wrote and spoke passionately about abolition, women's suffrage, and temperance, building a reputation as an eloquent public speaker as well as a popular author. Her 1854 collection Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects brought her broad attention, and she later published essays, speeches, short fiction, and the novel Iola Leroy, a landmark work by an African American woman writer.

What makes Harper especially memorable is the way she joined literature and activism. Her writing is direct, compassionate, and deeply engaged with questions of justice, faith, and citizenship, helping make her an essential figure in both American literature and reform history.