Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is the author of five books of poetry; her latest book is The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan, 2020), based upon the life and times of Phillis Wheatley (Peters), a former enslaved person who was the first African American woman to publish a book. Jeffers has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress, among others, and is the recipient of the Harper Lee Award for Literary Distinction. A native southerner, she now lives on the prairie where she is Professor of English at University of Oklahoma.