Please join filmmaker, Leslie Askew, for an early screening of her documentary In Search of Phillis Wheatley Peters, which brings together historians, literature scholars, and cultural studies specialists to spotlight, in the 2026 US-founding anniversary year, a vital figure of the Revolutionary era. Following the screening there will be a roundtable discussion with selected students, Leslie Askew, and producer, Turlough White. This event is free and open to the public but registration is required. Please use the register link above.

This event is sponsored by:

AddRan College of Liberal Arts
Center for Connection Culture
Center for Public Education and Community Engagement
Department of English
John V. Roach Honors College
Lillian Radford Chair of Rhetoric and Composition
Lorraine Sherley Professorship in Literature
Mary Couts Burnett Library

Wheatley (Peters) was the first Black woman to publish a book of poetry in North America. She achieved this milestone while still a teenager enslaved by the Wheatley family in a region of the then-British colonies not always associated with the history of slavery in the Americas—Massachusetts. She had arrived in Boston in 1761 while still a very young girl, stolen from her family in West Africa, and having somehow survived a Middle Passage journey that ended in death for many other captives on the same ship. Susanna and John Wheatley purchased her on the Boston dock, thereafter calling her by the name of the ship, The Phillis, which had brought her to North America.

Traveling to London in 1773 to secure a publisher for her book when efforts to raise adequate support in the Boston area fell short, Wheatley met an array of elites (including upper-crust British politicians and Benjamin Franklin, then living in England). She simultaneously enhanced her own position as a global celebrity with numerous prior publications of her writing having appeared in periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic. Returning to Boston to provide nursing care during the final days of her enslaver Susanna Wheatley’s life, Phillis lived only a decade longer herself.

This final period in the poet-activist’s life is one focus of Askew’s compelling documentary. The film presents new details from archive-digging by scholars like historian Cornelia Dayton, who chronicles Phillis’s experiences after being freed by the Wheatleys (under pressure from British abolitionists) and marrying free Black entrepreneur John Peters. Though Wheatley Peters died tragically young, without finding a publisher for her second book, she used her writings during this period to support a vision of the American Revolution as a potential pathway to freedom for all. Her 1775 poem to George Washington—and the general’s appreciative written response to her—represents just one example of her determined efforts to exercise political agency during that challenging wartime period.

Wheatley Peters stands as an important reminder that Black women have always brought leadership to American communities and the US nation at large. And Texas—home to leaders like Barbara Jordan and our own city’s Opal Lee—is an ideal place to celebrate Phillis as one example among many through screening of this film by Leslie Askew, herself a Houston, Texas, native.

Bridging the time between Black history month and women’s history month, we are proud to host this exciting documentary in spring 2026, surely an important time to honor and learn from stories like Wheatley Peters’s.