Poetry

Pre-19th Century:

  • Phillis Wheatley

  • Anne Bradstreet

  • Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton

19th Century:

  • Celia Thaxter

  • Annie Fields

  • Sarah Orne Jewett

  • María Bibiana Benítez & Alejandrina Benítez de Gautier

  • Laura Redden Searing

  • Bamewawagezhikaquay, or Jane Johnston Schoolcraft,

  • Margaret Fuller

  • Frances Jane Crosby

20th Century:

  • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

  • Anna Lee Walters

  • Merle Woo

  • Nellie Wong

  • Anne Spencer

  • Ntozake Shange

  • Mitsuye Yamada

  • Julia de Burgos

  • Mary TallMountain

  • Beth Brant

  • Eileen Myles

  • Lola Ridge

  • Pearl S. Buck

  • Charlotte Armstrong

  • Zoe Akins

  • Zitkála-Šá

  • Angelina Weld Grimké

  • Pat Parker

“I am obnoxious to each carping tongue/Who says my hand a needle better fits./A Poet’s Pen all scorn I should thus wrong,/For such despite they cast on female wits./If what I do prove well, it won’t advance,/They’ll say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance.”

- Anne Bradstreet, The Prologue