Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was a poet, fiction writer, journalist, and activist born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1825. After teaching for a few years in Ohio and Pennsylvania, she traveled and gave speeches on the abolitionist circuit. She is considered a mother of African American journalism.
Harper published many collections of poetry, including Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854), Sketches of Southern Life (1872), which discusses the Reconstruction, and Atlanta Offering (1895).
Information from the Poetry Foundation.