Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins (1825–1911), African-American writer and lecturer. Her collected Poems (1871), and other books (later published in such collections as Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects [1954]), deal with antislavery and other racial themes. She also wrote a novel, Iola Leroy (1893). Born in Baltimore of free parents, she began writing poetry in her teens, and in 1854 began delivering antislavery lectures in the United States and Canada. Later she spoke in support of women's suffrage and was active in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union.