Department of English

This essay examines how the 1973 Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival presents its namesake as a figure meaningfully shaped by Black women’s critical and creative treatments of her work. Following the participants’ understanding of the same, this essay argues that the Festival’s archival impacts must be understood as a register of Black women’s intimacies and mutual address documented across its participants’ prose, verse, visual art, and performance. Rather than treating on the scantness of the Festival’s extant ephemera as a phenomenon of anti-Black misogyny alone, this essay maintains a focus on how the participants’ serious attention to each other’s creative lives challenges its audience to consider Wheatley Peters archives alongside other Black women in her own time and since.