Foremother Love: Phillis Wheatley and Black Feminist Criticism , published by Duke University Press in July 2025 and authored by Dana Murphy, Assistant Professor of Black Studies and English, honors the writing of Phillis Wheatley (Peters)-a Black woman who lived in colonial North America/New England in the latter half of the 18th century whose work was integral to Black feminist criticism in the 20th century. Phillis (as Murphy refers to her) was forcibly taken up by transatlantic chattel enslavers as a child (West Africa-Boston) but later became a poet who used the occasion of her published writing to negotiate her own manumission (freedom from slavery) from the Wheatley family. In her book, Murphy provides further and new research on Phillis's life.
Applying methods from the fields of literature in English and Black American and diaspora studies, Murphy demonstrates that these two historical contexts-Phillis's time and our own-remain interrelated and dynamic. She shows that Phillis predicted what would later be termed in the 20th century "Black feminist criticism," a body of theory for understanding the writings of Black women. These later critics then continued to engage in the project of recovering understudied aspects of Phillis's work.
We recently spoke to Murphy about her book.
Do you recall when you first came across Phillis's writings?
I began working on Phillis-I discuss this naming choice in my book-specifically a little over 10 years ago when I started very intensively reading her work during my qualifying examination reading for my doctorate. I have been a serious reader and writer since I can remember, and I received a very well-rounded secondary education across the arts, humanities, and sciences, which helped me learn to follow my intellectual interests as an undergraduate and then graduate student at the large land-grant "multiversity" of the University of California (to quote Clark Kerr [chancellor of UC Berkeley in the 1950s and president of the University of California system in the late 1950s to 1960s]). After my quals, I did archival research across the United States while working on my dissertation and then as a tenure-track postdoctoral fellow and assistant professor at the University of Michigan, all before COVID-19. I was then able to begin the process of telling the story of my research as a book.
I can also recall reading Phillis in my teens when I began reading my mother's books. She still has all her books from college, and Phillis is included in her copy of Dudley Randall's anthology Black Poets, and in her copy of The Heath Introduction to Poetry, which, of course, includes only Phillis's most famous poem "On Being Brought from Africa to America." I am still very interested in the ways in which Phillis is, in some ways, ever present in the canon and, in other ways, footnoted or abridged. I should add that I grew up in a very multicultural part of Altadena in the 1990s and went to a school where we read inclusively so I was immersed in Black American literature and culture from a young age.
I did wonder if my mother annotated the poem "On Being Brought"-that surely would have made it into my book!-but alas perhaps it was not even assigned in her classes.
What drew you to investigate Phillis's life and work?
When I attended graduate school at UC Irvine, in a program well known for critical theory, there were several prominent poetics scholars on the faculty, so I knew I wanted to write my dissertation on poetics. I also met and took several seminars with a prominent scholar of African American and Black diasporic literature, who herself had studied under Barbara Christian at UC Berkeley; Christian was one of the "foremothers" of Black feminist criticism of the 1970s to '90s, who sadly passed away before I was an undergrad at Berkeley. My dissertation became a space to learn from and build my own scholarly identity across these fields. When this project grew into a tenure-track faculty book, I was still drawn to Phillis as a poetics scholar who worked from an understanding of herself as a Black woman. I loved that she took the time to build her genius far beyond expectation, to hone her literary craft for the roughly 39 poems that would comprise her 1773 Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. As I grew in my understanding of her, I found that my own moral voice, fortitude, and sense of justice grew as well.
Some critics have viewed Phillis as an important foremother while others have suggested that she is interesting only by virtue of being the "first African American poet." When you address her as a "foremother" in your book, what do you mean by that? How do you conceptualize your work in relationship to her?
Being the first is such a precarious position to be in in almost every situation, so in my book I tried to engage the idea with a bit of flexibility. In English as a field, even the training for the doctorate is structured around a reading examination of works that are predominately text-based. But books, as such, and books of poems in particular, traffic in prestige in particular ways that affect Black women, and women of color, uniquely, often violently. Someone like Phillis-even her English name, ascribed by her enslavers from the ship she was brought within on the Middle Passage to Boston-has been dealt an often-unprotected print history. Also, the very first Black American woman to craft poetry publicly that we know of was Lucy Terry (Prince), who is less well known, likely because her only known poem, "Bars Fight," first circulated only in oral history.
So, in my book, the term "foremother" was, beyond its traditional definition, a term I meditated on to see if it could poetically and critically do different work-if it could value Phillis differently for other equally important kinds of knowledge she offers. I wanted to try to value her as a foremother insofar as that could also mean as a sister, or a colleague, or, even better, as a colleague-friend. So, while a distanced reading of Phillis might read her alone and only in her 18th-century context, a "foremother love" reading is interested in tradition by reading her affectively in her moment and as she meets in the halls, so to speak, with Barbara Christian, Audre Lorde, June Jordan-who also referred to Phillis using her first name-Sherley Anne Williams, Robert Hayden, and more, in the 20th century and beyond. These were scholar-writers who were, like Phillis, very interested in literature and care with special regard to envisioning a more humane United States of America.
In Foremother Love you write that "there is a long history of readers trying to rewrite Phillis's poems into the poems they would rather read." What do you think motivates this reaction?
I remember this is one of the earliest lines I wrote for this project, and I love that because here I am 10 years later; I engage this idea with seriousness toward the kinds of "abridgement" that characterized Phillis's reception and which has real effects on how her work reaches readers. At the same time, I think it is an important practice as a scholar to be able to engage conviviality and celebration, and I like to approach literary abridgments or other liberties taken with intention toward what that critic may have been going through. As a field, I hope we endeavor toward a criticism that is interdisciplinary and no less evidence-based, of course. For I know, as a perfectionist, the need to triple-check each of my citations made that aspect of writing my book both pleasurable and quite time-consuming. One of my favorite moments in my book engages Phillis's collegial friendship with Obour Tanner, a Black woman whose letters-reflected in Phillis's replies to her letters-show that she also had her own ideas of what Phillis's poetry should be.
Wheatley emerges from your book as a sort of palimpsest of a continuing conversation among Black women engaged in writing literature and literary criticism. What would you most like readers to understand about the concerns and commitments of this community?
I love the sound of the word palimpsest. There is a concept I'm reminded of in a fascinating multicultural television show I'm currently watching based on Robert Jordan's novels. I remember from my medieval literature courses the concept of "fortune's wheel," which basically served as a reminder of the random fortune, good or bad, that might at any moment come-you could be the writer in one breath or erased in the next. In [Jordan's book] The Wheel of Time, however, there is a bit of grace, such that every few generations a soul that passed away in one life will be reborn in another-and, chances are, you're going to come back as someone completely different. What people hope is that if they were stripped of dignity in one life, they come back with protection or with greater power.
I found this to be true in my own research-future Black feminist critics, after Phillis died, overarchingly reestablished her with a seat of honor at their table, as I describe across Foremother Love (or uncapitalized as foremother love, as I've also been delighted to have seen the book's title styled). So, the book is about how care for Phillis, a tradition crafted from a practice of foremother love broadly, contributed to establishing Black feminist criticism-a tradition that itself helped establish African American literature as a field, as indicated in Black feminist critics' key involvement in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature or with their efforts to establish Toni Morrison as a world-renowned writer. But Black feminist critics did not stop there; they made the university more inclusive to all.
Your research involved a lot of archival work. Do you have a favorite discovery you made while doing archival research on Phillis?
In addition to literary archives, my research also involved reading various archives of the literary profession. So, I read the papers of several late 20th-century Black feminist critics whose papers are archived in universities. I learned so much from these, how so much in the profession leaves a public trace. I also discovered how much operates on affection and intimacy-how professors' care and love for their work shaped a field in which Phillis could be included. I also visited Phillis's extant papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society to see them in their original manuscript form-to be able to touch the very same paper that she once wrote upon.
One of my most heartwarming trips took place quite close to my then home. I visited Wayne State University's library-across from the Detroit Institute of the Arts-to read in person a copy of Robert Hayden's first book of poems, Heart-Shape in the Dust. This was a book that he later disowned as an amateur effort-something like how Octavia E. Butler felt about her novel Survivor, of which I gratefully have a copy. I got to take photos of Hayden's book, of each poem, and the final poem of his book ends with this incredible invitation to an unexpected group to join in liberation.
Going into special collections to read the papers of poets, critics, and writers-that work has been and continues to be important, and archival access and preservation matters for the humanities and the world broadly.
Are the women to whom you dedicate your book, Mami and Mima, also foremothers?
"Mami" was the term of endearment for my maternal great-grandmother, and "Mima" for my maternal grandmother. Both passed before I was born and both were Afro-Cuban immigrants to the US. They were highly educated, well read, intimidating-I'm told-women, and my grandmother even graduated from seminary. I'm learning more about them later in life so their relation to me is more as foremothers because I didn't know them personally, and their work is work that I'm hoping to build upon in continued research.
Most of Phillis's poems were elegies, poems of mourning written on the deaths of many of her white community members. The goal, in my criticism and in my writing, is to continue this project for people like my grandmothers who have never been elegized in print until now. My poem, "Elegy in Purple," for example, is published in the next issue of Poet Lore .
In 2024-25, Dana Murphy conducted research as an external faculty fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. Murphy's latest works include her essay, "Black Feminisms," in Phillis Wheatley (Peters) in Context, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press; her essay on Phillis as one of the US's "Founding Feminists," which will appear in Ms. magazine this spring; and her academic article on the Afro-Caribbean text The History of Mary Prince (1831), forthcoming in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. For updates on Murphy's work, visit foremotherlove.com .
