19th Century

This image is from the private collection of Diana Birchall, granddaughter of Winnifred Eaton. Accessed via Wikimedia Commons & displayed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 License. The image has only been altered in size to fit this page.

Sui Sin Far

Also found under Short Fiction, Nonfiction, AAPI Writers

Who Was She?

Edith Maud Eaton, better known by her Cantonese pen name Sui Sin Far, meaning "water lily," was born in 1865 in England. Around 1866, her family immigrated to the U.S., and Sin Far subsequently lived in several countries, including Canada. She began working as a stenographer at the age of eighteen, and went on to become a published short story writer, essayist, and investigative journalist, writing such fiction pieces as Mrs. Spring Fragrance and using her journalistic platform to promote the rights and equality of Chinese individuals and an appreciation of the struggles immigrants and people of different races felt in local, national, and international publications. 

What Did She Write About?

Lives of and equality for Chinese individuals, Romance, Race, Identity, Immigrant experience, Autobiography

Where Can I Find Her Work?

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

Also found under Short Fiction, Poetry, Children's Fiction, 20th Century, Award-Winners

Who Was She?

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman was born in 1852 in Massachusetts. As a child, she loved fairytales and literature at large, and enjoyed such authors as Charles Dickens, Sarah Orne Jewett, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Leo Tolstoy. She wrote some of her earliest short stories with her friend, Evelyn Sawyer, and went on to write popular poems, children's books, and short stories/collections, including The New England Nun & Other Stories. Among her most famous short stories is the radical The Revolt of Mother, which, along with many more of her stories, featured strong female leads with taciturn male side characters. In the 1920s, Freeman won the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and became one of the first women elected to the National Institute for Arts and Letters.

What Did She Write About?

Women's autonomy, New England life, Religion

Where Can I Find Her Work?

Margaret Fuller

Also found under Nonfiction, Poetry

Who Was She?

Sarah Margaret Fuller was born in 1810 in Massachusetts. In 1836, Fuller began applying Transcendentalist ideas to women in a number of discussions with her contemporaries, including Lydian Emerson, Sarah Ripley, Lydia Maria Child, and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, demonstrating that women could engage with philosophy just as well as men. In 1840, Fuller partnered with Ralph Waldo Emerson to create and edit The Dial, a transcendentalist periodical, before joining the New York Tribune. Five years later, she published her own book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which is considered the first feminist work in American literature. She then travelled to Rome and served as a foreign correspondent for The Tribune during the Italian Unification.

What Did She Write About?

Feminism, Transcendentalism, Politics

Where Can I Find Her Work?

Sarah Moore Grimké & Angelina Grimké Weld

Also found under Nonfiction, Award-Winners

Who Were They?

Sarah and Angelina Grimké were born to wealthy slaveholders in South Carolina, Sarah in 1792 and Angelina in 1805, but both later moved to Pennsylvania. The two sisters were active abolitionists and Quakers, and, as members of the American Anti-Slavery Society, became the first women to speak in front of a state legislature. They were also advocates for women's rights, and wrote a number of pamphlets advocating for abolition and suffrage, including Appeal to the Christian Women of the South, Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States, and Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women. The people of the South were so opposed to their ideas that they burned their writings and threatened to arrest them, but the sisters continued writing and speaking in spite of the criticism. Both women have now been inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

What Did They Write About?

Feminism, Transcendentalism, Politics, Slavery

Where Can I Find Their Work?

Eliza Suggs

Also found under Nonfiction, Black Writers, Writers with Disabilities

Who Was She?

Eliza Suggs was born in 1876 in Illinois to former slaves. She grew up with osteogenesis imperfecta, which caused her bones to break very easily and frequently throughout childhood. Her condition was so severe that her parents had a funeral dress made for her when she was five years old, thinking that she would not live much longer. Suggs, however, lived to be 32 years old, and became a successful temperance lecturer. Her autobiography, Shadow & Sunshine, contains much of the little information that is known about her today. In it, she described her family, discussed her strong Christian faith, rejected suggestions that she market herself as an oddity for profit, and condemned slavery by describing the pain and humiliation enslaved people were subjected to.

What Did She Write About?

Autobiography, Slavery, Faith

Where Can I Find Her Work?

Image used in accordance with 17 U.S. Code § 107. Accessed from https://archive.org/details/wynemachildoffor0000call/page/n5/mode/2up , including caption

Sophia Alice Callahan

Also found under Novels, Native American Writers

Who Was She?

Sophia Alice Callahan was born in 1868 in Texas to an Anglo-American mother and a Muscogee, or Creek, father. In the 1890s, she taught at schools in Native American territory, including the Wealaka Mission School and the Harrell Institute. In 1891, she began working as an editor for Our Brother in Red, a Methodist periodical published at Muskogee in Native American territory. That same year, she published her novel Wynema, A Child of the Forest, at the age of 23, likely while attending the Wesleyan Female Institute in Virginia. The novel detailed the friendship between a Creek girl and her Anglo teacher, and advocates for the rights of both Native Americans and women. The book was largely forgotten until the 1980s, and in the 1990s, it was republished for modern day readers to enjoy. Today, Callahan is remembered as the first Native American female novelist.

What Did She Write About?

Native American rights, Women's suffrage, Cross-cultural friendship, Romance

Where Can I Find Her Work?

Bamewawagezhikaquay, or Jane Johnston Schoolcraft

Also found under Indigenous Writers, Poetry, Award-Winners

Who Was She?

Bamewawagezhikaquay, or "Woman of the Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky," was born in 1800 in Sault Ste. Marie, a part of modern-day Michigan, to an Ojibwe leader and a Scottish-Irish fur trader. As a child, she learned to speak in both Ojibwe and English, and read many books from her father's library. Circa 1815, after visiting England and Ireland, she began writing poetry, amounting to approximately fifty poems in both her household languages. She also translated Indian oral stories and songs to English, and is renowned for her skill in weaving the languages together. Today, she is believed to be the first Native American female writer, and potentially, the first Native American writer of literature. Though she never published her work during her lifetime, many of her poems were published posthumously by Robert Dale Parker in The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky: The Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft. In 2009, she was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame.

What Did She Write About?

Poetry, Native American stories and songs

Where Can I Find Her Work?

Laura Redden Searing

Also found under Poetry, Nonfiction, Writers with Disabilities

Who Was She?

Laura Redden Searing was born in 1839 in Maryland. At the age of 11, she became deaf after contracting meningitis. From 1857-1858, she submitted poems to Harper's Magazine, and in 1858, the American Annals of the Deaf professional journal published her first essay, written on the topics of deaf culture, sign language, and writing. That same year, she graduated from the Missouri School for the Deaf, but was unable to attend college, since no colleges accepted deaf women at the time. Throughout her life, critics doubted her ability to write poetry, questioning how she could know anything about rhyme or rhythm, since she was deaf. In spite of the criticism, Searing wrote more than 70 poems and also pursued a career as a journalist. In 1859, she was hired as a columnist at the St. Louis Presbyterian, and went on to become the editorialist for the St. Louis Republican in 1860, where she officially adopted the pseudonym Howard Glyndon. In 1861, the Republican sent her to Washington, D.C. to cover the American Civil War. She documented the war from a pro-Union perspective, and wrote poetry about the intimately human side of events on the battlefield. She also wrote letters to both Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant. She published her first book of poetry, Idyls of Battle, and Poems of the Rebellion in 1864, and from 1865 to 1869, she embarked on a tour of Europe, working as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times and learning German, French, Spanish, and Italian. In 1870, she returned to the U.S., taking a job as a staff writer for the New York Evening Mail and contributing to such publications as Galaxy, Harper’s Magazine, and the Tribune. In 1872, the town of Glyndon, Minnesota was named in her honor. Today, many believe her to be the first deaf female journalist. 

What Did She Write About?

Culture & politics human interest stories, Deafness, Sign language, Writing

Where Can I Find Her Work?

Nellie Bly

Also found under Nonfiction, Novels, Award-Winners

Who Was She?

Nellie Bly was born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in 1864 in Pennsylvania to a wealthy steel mill owner. When he died when Bly was six, the family fell into financial trouble, and Bly attempted to attend school to become a teacher to support her family but ran out of funds and returned home to help her mother run a boardinghouse. Shortly after, Bly read a column in the Pittsburgh Dispatch that decried working women, saying their place was in the home. Furious, Bly wrote a letter to the editor pushing back against the arguments in the piece, and so impressed the editor that he published her rebuttal and offered her a job. However, as a journalist for the Dispatch, she was primarily restricted to writing about society events in the women’s column. She convinced the editor to let her be a foreign correspondent in Mexico, an experience which she wrote about in her book Six Months in Mexico. From there, she dedicated her life and her work to advocating for the poor and vulnerable, often going under-cover to see what working conditions were like in places such as factories, intimidating more than a few businessmen into improving working conditions. In 1887, she went undercover to fake insanity and get herself committed to the Blackwell Island Mental Institution for ten days, documenting her experience first in a series of articles for The New York World and later in her book, Ten Days in a Madhouse, which brought much-needed reforms to the asylum. She also became one of the first female industrialists to head a large company, and travelled around the world in a record-breaking 72 days, a journey that she wrote about in her Around the World in 72 Days. Additionally, several novels by Bly have recently been discovered. In 1998, Bly was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

What Did She Write About?

Working class citizens/Factory workers,Women, Poor and vulnerable members of society, Mental institutions, Travel, Romance, Mystery

Where Can I Find Her Work?

Image on the left is of María Bibiana Benítez and is in the public domain

Image on the right is a drawing of Alejandrina Benítez de Gautier by User Marine 69-71 on Wikimedia Commons. Displayed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Image has been cropped & altered in size to fit this page. The original image can be found here.

María Bibiana Benítez & Alejandrina Benítez de Gautier

Also found under Poetry, Latinx Writers, Award-Winners

Who Were They?

María Bibiana Benítez was born in 1783 in Puerto Rico to an elite Creole family. Throughout her childhood, she lived in many different areas of Puerto Rico, observing a diverse array of lifestyles. As an adult, she lived first in the city of Mayagüez, from which she adapted two of her literary pseudonyms ("Una Mayagüezana" and "Jíbaro de Mayagüés"), before settling in San Juan. There, she made her home a gathering for artists, writers, and intellectuals. Around this time, she also adopted her niece, Alejandrina Benítez de Gautier, and, in 1832, wrote her best-known poem,  “La ninfa de Puerto Rico,” which appeared in La Gaceta de Puerto Rico, the island's first newspaper. Her subsequent poems, including, "Historical Romance", "Ode to Justice", "Allegorical Dialogue", "Sonnet" and "A la Vejez" were published in Instructional and Mercantile Bulletin of Puerto Rico, among other Puerto Rican publications. In addition to her poetry, she wrote two plays: Dialogue in gift of the desired Birth of HRH The Prince of Asturias, a dialogue in verse, and La cruz del Morro, the latter of which premiered in 1897 at the Municipal Theater of San Juan and was awarded the honors of the printing press in San Juan de Puerto Rico. Today, she is remembered as the first Puerto Rican poet and likely its first playwright.

Alejandrina Benítez de Gautier was born in Puerto Rico in 1819 and was orphaned early in her childhood before being taken in by her aunt, who became one of her poetic inspirations. In 1843, she collaborated with other writers on the collection "Aguinaldo Puertorriqueño," and circa 1863, she wrote “The Submarine Cable in Puerto Rico,” her most famous work. She stood out in her own time and today as one of the greatest Puerto Rican poets. She is also the namesake of Alejandrina Benitez de Gautier School.

What Did They Write About?

Working class citizens/Factory workers,Women, Poor and vulnerable members of society, Mental institutions, Travel, Romance, Mystery

Where Can I Find Their Work?

Sarah Orne Jewett

Also found under Novels, Short Fiction, Nonfiction (Letters), Poetry, Children’s Literature, Queer Writers

Who Was She?

Sarah Orne Jewett was born in 1849 in Maine and released her first short story when she was 19 years old. In 1877, she shaped several more of her stories into her novel, Deephaven, which was inspired in part by her grandparents' eighteenth- century house, where she was born. As an adult, she spent part of her time living with her sister and part travelling with Annie Fields, a fellow writer and one of Jewett's close friends. Some scholars now speculate that Jewett and Fields were lovers, and some of Jewett’s work has been interpreted as portraying both close female friendships and sapphic love. During her lifetime, Jewett published many successful stories and skits, including Old Friends and New (1879), Country By-Ways (1881), A White Heron and Other Stories (1886), and A Native of Winby and Other Tales (1893). Additionally, she wrote a variety of children's stories, such as Play Days (1878), The Story of the Normans (1887), and Betty Leicester (1890), and novels, including A Country Doctor (1884), A Marsh Island (1885), and The Country of Pointed Firs (1896), which is perhaps her most well-known piece. While she is most notable today for her prose, her poetry, much of which was published posthumously in the 1916 collection Verses, is also fairly well-known. She is regarded by scholars as one of the most important writers of early American regionalism, often setting her writing in her beloved Maine.

What Did She Write About?

Maine & Maine traditions, Regionalism, Intimate character lives, Trials and progress of friendships, Humor

Where Can I Find Her Work?

Annie Fields

Also found under Poetry, Plays, Nonfiction, Queer Writers

Who Was She?

Annie Adams Fields was born in 1834 in Massachusetts to wealthy parents who supported progressive education for women. Fields attended a school in Boston which focused especially on literature and classics. As an adult, she was noted as an inviting hostess to many literary intellectuals, and was also skilled in helping to discover and nurture new literary voices, including Sarah Orne Jewett, whom she became close friends with. There is also some speculation that Fields and Jewett were lovers. Fields frequently advised her husband on what works his companies should publish, and went on to edit several collections of letters and publish her own work, including two books of poetry (Under the Olive in 1880 and The Singing Shepherd and Other Poems in 1895), two plays, and brief biographical sketches of such figures as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Celia Thaxter, and John Greenleaf Whittier. After her husband's death, Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett developed what came to be called a Boston Marriage: a tight-knit friendship between two career women who lived together, independent from men, and supported and encouraged each other. Fields also made significant contributions to charity and was an active suffragette.

What Did She Write About?

Biographies of literary and historical figures; Religion; Nature; Personal reflections and friendships; Greek philosophers

Where Can I Find Her Work?

Celia Laighton Thaxter

Also found under Poetry, Nonfiction

Who Was She?

Celia Laighton was born in 1835 in New Hampshire and spent most of her childhood on White Island in the Isle of Shoals, where her father worked as a lighthouse keeper. When she moved to the mainland with her husband, she wrote a private poem entitled "Land-Locked" about how much she missed the islands of her childhood. In 1860, her husband found the poem and published it in The Atlantic Monthly, where it immediately gained popularity. She went on to publish many more poems, essays, and prose writings, including “Milking,” “The Great White Owl,” “The Kingfisher," “The Sandpiper," and “A Memorable Murder." She returned to the island to take care of her family and work as a hostess at their hotel, welcoming many literary greats, including Sarah Orne Jewett. She was also skilled as a gardener, seamstress, cook, and painter. Shortly before her death, she published her most well-known book, An Island Garden, where she reflects on and provides in-depth descriptions of her garden on the island, which still remains to this day.

What Did She Write About?

Nature; Her garden; The sea; Her experiences and longing for the Isle of Shoals; A murder that took place on the island

Where Can I Find Her Work?

Thocmetony, or Sarah Winnemucca

Also found under Nonfiction, Native American Writers, Award-Winners

Who Was She?

Sarah Winnemucca was born Thocmetony, or "shell flower," circa 1844 in modern-day Nevada to a Northern Paiute family. When Winnemucca was six years old, her grandfather, a Paiute chief, took her with him to California, where she learned five languages and worked in the household of Major Ormsby in Nevada, returning to her tribe when they were mistreated by white settlers. At sixteen, she informally attended a convent school in San Jose, where she increased her knowledge of mainstream white American culture. In 1871, after all of the Paiute Indians were forced onto reservations, she took a job as an interpreter for the Bureau of Indian Affairs at Fort McDermitt on the Oregon border. During the Bannock War of 1878, she served as an interpreter and scout for the U.S. Army, and saved her father and other troops lives by traversing 200 miles of dangerous terrain in 48 hours with no sleep. In 1880, she travelled to Washington D.C. and advocated for the rights and fair treatment of the Paiute, addressing Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz and President Rutherford B. Hayes. She obtained promises that the U.S. government would improve the treatment and conditions of Native Americans, but they were never carried out, and the unfulfilled promises caused her people to distrust her. Still, she continued to advocate for the Paiutes, delivering over 400 speeches, educating Paiute children and founding a school for Native American children, and, in 1883, publishing Life Among the Piutes, which was one of the first books penned by a Native American woman. She worked to facilitate cross-cultural understandings between white settlers and Native Americans, and her honors include a posthumous Nevada Writers Hall of Fame Award, an elementary school founded in 1994 that was named in her honor, and her 1994 induction into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

What Did She Write About?

History of the West as seen/experienced by Native Americans, Plea for justice and fair treatment for Paiute based on an intimate understanding of them

Where Can I Find Her Work?

Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton

Also found under Novels, Nonfiction (Letters), Latinx Writers

Who Was She?

Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton was born in 1832 to a wealthy family on Mexico's Baja Peninsula. At the end of of the Mexican-American War, during which her aristocratic family lost control of Baja, she moved to California with her mother. She interacted with both Latino and Anglo Californians, and quickly learned to write and speak English fluently. After her husband's death in 1869, Ruiz worked to support herself and her family, founding a cement plant, a commercial-scale castor bean factory, and a water reservoir on her family's ranch, none of which yielded a high profit, while also fighting for land rights and her claim on family property. During this time, she also began writing, releasing two novels: Who Would Have Thought It? in 1872 and The Squatter and the Don in 1885, which use cutting wit and satire to criticize New England culture and President Lincoln, and give voice to the frustration and struggles of the Californio population whose land was invaded by Anglo individuals. She also wrote a play: Don Quixote de la Mancha: A Comedy in Five Acts, and was the first Mexican American author to publish in English.

What Did She Write About?

Historical romance; Satire; Race/Racism (Please note: some of her writing contains racist and anti-Semitic stereotypes-the creator of this website unequivocally condemns and in no way supports such stereotypes); Classism; Gender; Power; Criticism of American imperialism and Manifest Destiny; American monopoly capitalism; Feudal Spanish rancho system in California; New England culture; Californio families and experiences; Californio/Latino land rights and struggles

Where Can I Find Her Work?

Ida B. Wells

Also found under Nonfiction, Black Writers, Award-Winners

Who Was She?

Ida B. Wells was born in 1862 in Mississippi. Wells attended Rust College, but was expelled after having a disagreement with the university president. In 1878, a yellow fever epidemic swept her hometown, killing both of her parents and her baby brother and leaving Wells to take care of her remaining siblings. Determined to keep the family together, Wells took a job as a teacher, later moving to Memphis, Tennessee with her sisters to be close to their aunt. In 1884, after being forcibly removed from a first-class train carriage on which she had a ticket, Wells sued the train company for unfair treatment and won at the local level, before the federal court sided with the train company. Angered by the court's ruling, Wells began writing about Southern politics, Jim Crow laws, and racism at large in the South, publishing a number of articles in Black newspapers and periodicals under the pen name "Iola." She went on to co-own The Memphis Free Speech & Headlight newspaper, and also taught in segregated schools before losing her job is 1891 due to her public criticism of segregated education. In 1892, a close friend of Wells and two of his business partners who owned a grocery store were lynched after defending their store against a mob attack. Wells wrote articles condemning the lynching and risked her life to investigate and expose the horrific injustice of lynching across the South. After the publication of one of her articles, her newspaper office was mobbed and destroyed, and Wells received death threats. Opting to stay in the North, she wrote a detailed report on lynching for the New York Age. In 1893 she decried the exclusion of African Americans from the World’s Columbian Exposition; in 1896, she founded several civil rights organizations, including the National Association of Colored Women, and co-founded the NAACP; in 1898 she challenged President McKinley to take action against lynching; and in 1913, she founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago. As club president, Wells was invited to march in the 1913 Suffrage Parade in D.C., but she and other members were asked to march at the back of the parade by suffragettes afraid of offending Southern White women. Wells refused, and instead marched at the front of the Chicago delegation. She and the other members of the Alpha Suffrage Club were instrumental in the passage of the Illinois Equal Suffrage Act of 1913. Wells's published works include Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, The Red Record, and Crusade for Justice, her autobiography. In 2020, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her reporting.

What Did She Write About?

Racial Issues; Lynching; Autobiography

Where Can I Find Her Work?

Harriet Jacobs

Also found under Nonfiction, Black Writers, Award-Winners

Who Was She?

Harriet Jacobs was born into slavery in 1813 in North Carolina. Starting when she was six years old, she was forced to work for Dr. James Norcom, who sexually harassed her and repeatedly threatened rape. Terrified of Norcom and afraid to confide in her straight-laced grandmother, Jacobs married a white lawyer and had two children with him, hoping that her husband would buy and free them and that Norcom would be deterred from her, now that she had lost her virginity to another man of her choosing. Beginning in 1835, Jacobs spent seven years hiding in her grandmother's cramped attic on the Norcom property, watching over her children and sending letters to confuse Norcom about her location. In 1842, when Jacobs discovered her husband had not freed their children, she escaped to the North, found her daughter, and made arrangements for both children to live with her in Boston. With Norcom searching for her in New York, Jacobs was forced to move continuously. In 1849-50, she spent eighteen months in Rochester, working with her brother in an antislavery bookstore. There she befriended abolitionist and early feminist Amy Post, who became her confidant about the unwanted sexual advances Jacobs had experienced with Norcom and her experiences as fugitive slave. At Post's gentle suggestion and encouragement, Jacobs agreed to share her story, first through letters to publishers and later in her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, making her the first woman to pen a fugitive slave narrative in the U.S. and one of the first to speak out about the sexual harassment many enslaved women faced, a discussion even some abolitionists shied away from. Though it received acclaim from both the American and British presses, her account was quickly forgotten in the midst of the American Civil War, and was not republished until the Civil Rights and Women's Movements of the 1960s-70s. Since her death, she has been inducted into both the Reading Hall of Fame and the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame.

What Did She Write About?

Slavery; Fugitive slave experiences; Sexual harassment of slaves by slaveholders; Efforts to save her children from slavery

Where Can I Find Her Work?

Anna Katharine Green

Also found under Novels, Short Fiction, Poetry, Award-Winners

Who Was She?

Anna Katharine Green was born in 1846 in New York. She started out writing romantic verse, but when those poems did not gain traction, she turned to fiction. In 1878, her debut novel, and her most famous work, The Leavenworth Case, was published. In total, she published about 40 novels and books of short fiction, and became one of the best-selling writers of her time. She is also recognized as one of the pioneers of detective fiction in America, sometimes known as the "mother of the detective novel." Her works were particularly distinctive for their well-developed and legally-accurate plots. Some of her other works include A Strange Disappearance (1880), The Affair Next Door (1897), The Circular Study (1902), The Filigree Ball (1903), The Millionaire Baby (1905), The House in the Mist (1905), The Woman in the Alcove (1906), The House of the Whispering Pines (1910), Initials Only (1912), and The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow (1917). In 2021, she was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.

What Did She Write About?

Mystery, Detective Stories

Where Can I Find Her Work?

Frances Jane “Fanny” Crosby

Also found under Poetry, Nonfiction (Autobiography), Writers with Disabilities, Award-Winners

Who Was She?

Frances Crosby was born in 1820 in New York. At six weeks old, she lost her eyesight, and when she was still a child, she was declared permanently blind. She was not, however, upset by this diagnosis, remaining good-humored and optimistic. She had uncommonly strong senses of hearing and touch, enabling her to leap over stone walls, play tag, climb trees, and ride horses bareback as a child. She wrote her first poem at eight years old, and went on to attend the New York Institute for the Blind, where she realized her talent for memorizing and reciting Bible verses. While at the Institute, she survived the cholera epidemic and went on to graduate and, in 1844, publish her first book of poetry, The Blind Girl & Other Poems. From 1847 to 1858, she taught at the Institute, and, in 1858, published A Wreath of Columbia's Flowers. After she converted to Methodism, many religious figures and hymnists, including George F. Root, William B. Bradbury, Philip Phillips, Reverend Robert Lowry, and Mrs. E.L. Knapp began to take notice of her poetic talent, asking her to collaborate with them and put words to their melodies. In her lifetime, she wrote lyrics for over 8,000 songs and hymns, including "There's music in the air," "Hazel Dell," Rosalie," "The Prairie Flower," "Bird of the North," and "Safe in the Arms of Jesus," the latter of which was one of the first gospel hymns to be translated into another language. She also wrote the lyrics for the first secular American cantata, The Flower Queen, and became the first woman to speak in the U.S. Senate chamber when she performed a poem there. Crosby was also a champion of the "rescue mission" movement, supporting U.S. immigrants and those experiencing poverty. In her will, she left money for the creation of a men's shelter in Bridgeport, Connecticut, which operated for several decades after her death. Today, her gospel songs have sold over fifty million copies, and she has been inducted into the Faith Hall of Fame, the Christian Hall of Fame, and the Gospel Music Hall of Fame.

What Did She Write About?

Religion/Hymns, Contentment with her blindness, Autobiography

Where Can I Find Her Work?