She learned to read and write, and she published her first poem, “To the University of Cambridge in New England,” in 1773.
Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved woman later embraced by abolitionists to bolster their argument that Black people could be intellectuals, arrived in New England after being stolen from Africa at age 7. She learned to read and write, and she published her first poem, “To the University of Cambridge in New England,” in 1773.