Lucian Bottow Watkins

Born in Chesterfield, Virginia, in 1879, Lucian Bottow Watkins attended public schools there and later studied at Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute in Petersburg. He worked as a schoolteacher before publishing his first poetry collection, Voices of Solitude, in 1903.

Watkins went on to publish The Old Log Cabin in 1910 and became especially known for "The Star of Ethiopia," a 1918 poem connected to W. E. B. Du Bois's national tour of The Star of Ethiopia pageant. He also published in The Crisis and wrote on subjects ranging from personal reflection to race, patriotism, and the contradictions of serving a country that denied Black Americans full equality.

A soldier during World War I, Watkins served in the Philippines and later in France. He died on February 2, 1921, at Fort McHenry Hospital in Baltimore. His poetry was later included in important anthologies of Black writing, and he has been remembered as an important voice in African American poetry before the Harlem Renaissance.