ABHM Book Club: Poems on Various Subjects by Phillis Wheatley
We are excited to announce ABHM’s April’s Book of the Month: Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral by Phillis Wheatley. We invite you to join us on April 25th at 1:30 p.m. for a discussion of the book at America’s Black Holocaust Museum or virtually via Zoom.
History Toward Tomorrow: Why This Matters
In the year 2026 the United States is celebrating its semiquincentennial. At ABHM, we are using this as an opportunity to create programs where we can collectively reflect on our country’s history honestly to build a better, more equitable future. The selections for the ABHM Book Club in 2026 will emphasize historical truth-telling, compelling storytelling, and diverse perspectives on our collective past. We invite participants to consider what they want the country to look like over the next 250 years. What can we learn from visionaries, historians, and thought leaders from the past in how we envision the United States of the future? In the spirit of Dr. Cameron, we invite you to join us on this journey of reflection, healing, and dreaming.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Published in 1773, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral stands as a landmark in American and African American literary history. Written by Phillis Wheatley while she was enslaved in Boston, the collection of 39 poems introduced the world to the first African American to publish a book. Rooted in the neoclassical tradition and shaped by influences such as Alexander Pope, Wheatley’s poetry employs heroic couplets, elegies, and devotional verse to explore Christianity, morality, and classical ideals. Its London publication, accompanied by a frontispiece portrait and an attestation affirming her authorship, helped establish her credibility in an era determined to deny Black intellect.
Beyond its formal elegance, Wheatley’s work carries profound historical and moral weight. Through religious reflection, commemorative poems, and subtle but unmistakable engagements with freedom and tyranny—most notably in “On Being Brought from Africa to America”—the volume quietly challenges slavery and racial hierarchy. Poems on Various Subjects became powerful evidence against claims of African inferiority and remains a foundational text in early abolitionist thought, marking Phillis Wheatley as both a literary pioneer and a figure of enduring cultural significance.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Phillis Wheatley was born around 1753 in West Africa and was forcibly transported to Boston as a child, where she was enslaved by the Wheatley family. Unlike most enslaved people of her era, she was educated by her enslavers and quickly demonstrated extraordinary aptitude in reading, writing, and classical studies. By her early teens, she was composing poetry that engaged the Bible, Greco-Roman literature, and Enlightenment thought—an intellectual range that placed her in conversation with some of the most learned figures of the eighteenth century.
Wheatley gained international recognition during her lifetime, corresponding with prominent leaders and intellectuals, including George Washington, whom she addressed in verse. After years of legal and financial precarity, she was manumitted, though freedom brought continued hardship rather than security. She died in 1784 in poverty, her later writings largely unpublished. Today, Phillis Wheatley is recognized as a foundational figure in American letters whose life and work reshaped the boundaries of authorship, literacy, and voice in the early United States.
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