Was reading a little bit about Phyllis Wheatley the other day. For those who don’t know, she was a slave girl taken from Africa when she was about five or six and who eventually got bought by a wealthy New York family. Realizing how intelligent she was, they taught her to read and write and introduced her to the classics, leading her to become a fairly well-known poet in her day (might feature one of her poems here someday). Thought she actually had to go to England to get published for…you know. Reasons.

Anyway, one of the pieces I read proudly described her as “the first African American to be published in the modern age.”

To which I have to wonder: “In what other age could an ‘African American poet’ be published?”