After Foremother Love: Letter to a Young Black Woman Poet

Dana Elle Murphy (California Institute of Technology)

This talk, subtitled “Letter to a Young Black Woman Poet,” reflects on the process of making the academic book Foremother Love: Phillis Wheatley and Black Feminist Criticism (Duke University Press, 2025). In building a poetics for and a recounting of the ways Phillis practiced love, beauty, and sorrow, the book centers both on Phillis’s eighteenth-century contexts and on the Black feminist critical contexts that emerged across universities, libraries, literary societies, study groups, gardens, and personal papers in subsequent years, including Dana Elle Murphy’s own writing in the first quarter of the 2000s. In reflecting on Foremother Love, Murphy presents an epistolary invitation to join in continued creative and critical engagement with poetry, archives, and other forms of literary citizenship—past, present, and future.