Josephine Preston Peabody

Born in Brooklyn on May 30, 1874, she spent part of her childhood in New York before her family moved to Dorchester, Massachusetts, after her father's death. She studied at Boston Girls' Latin School and later attended Radcliffe as a special student, publishing poems while still very young.

Her early books included The Wayfarers and The Singing Leaves, and she went on to lecture on poetry and literature at Wellesley College from 1901 to 1903. In 1909, her verse drama The Piper, based on the Pied Piper legend, won the Stratford Prize Competition and was later staged in both London and New York.

Readers often remember her for the range of her writing: delicate, lyrical poems, children's verse such as The Book of the Little Past, and later work shaped by a stronger concern for social injustice. She died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 4, 1922, leaving behind a body of work that feels both graceful and quietly alive to the world around it.