The Writings of Phillis Wheatley Peters

Honorable Mention, Modern Language Association Prize for a Scholarly Edition, Modern Language Association

This edition includes all of the known surviving writings of the poet Phillis Wheatley Peters (1753-1784), several of which have been discovered since the last attempt at a complete edition was published in 2001. Of the fifty-seven poems, as well as their authoritative variants, forty-six were published during her lifetime. Versions of nine of them were published before September 1773. Wheatley Peters published thirty-eight works in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London, 1773). Only seven of her poems were published between 1773 and her death in 1784. Eleven poems survive only in manuscript versions. This edition also includes all of Wheatley Peters’ extant prose writings: twenty-three letters and four subscription proposals. It includes as well the three known surviving letters written to Wheatley Peters. Wheatley Peters’ writings are accompanied by an Introduction to her life and times, as well as extensive textual and explanatory notes.

Vincent Carretta, Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland

Vincent Carretta, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Maryland, specializes in eighteenth-century transatlantic historical and literary studies. In addition to more than one hundred articles and reviews on a range of eighteenth-century subjects, Carretta has published two books on verbal and visual Anglophone political satire between 1660 and 1820, as well as authoritative editions of the works of Olaudah Equiano, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, and other eighteenth-century transatlantic authors of African descent. Carretta’s most recent books are Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (2005); The Life and Letters of Philip Quaque, The First African Anglican Missionary (2010), co-edited with Ty M. Reese; and Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (2011). He is also the editor of Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African (2015).