Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (September 24, 1825 – February 22, 1911), also known as Frances Watkins Harper and Frances E.W. Harper, combined her talents as a writer, poet, and public speaker with a deep commitment to abolition and social reform.

She sustained a long and prolific publishing career at a time when it was rare for women, particularly women of color, to have a voice. She used that voice in powerful ways, and as a result, she has been referred to as “the mother of African American journalism.”

Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854), her first collection, was possibly her most successful, having gone through many editions. “The Two Offers” was the first published short story by a BlackAmerican woman. And Iola Leroy (1892) was one of the first novels by a Black woman to be published in the U.S.

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