Death Notice for Phillis Peters, Formerly Phillis Wheatley, Printed in the Massachusetts Centinel, Wednesday, December 8, 1784 [No. 23, Vol. 11]

[Wheatley, Phillis]. Death Notice for Phillis Peters, Formerly Phillis Wheatley, Printed in the Massachusetts Centinel, Wednesday, December 8, 1784 [No. 23, Vol. 11]. [Boston]: Warden & Russell, December 8, 1784. FIRST EDITION. Bifolium, 10-3/8" x 16-1/8"; trimmed at the top edge effecting some text but none of the death notice. [4] pp. "Phillis Wheatley Peters is broadly recognized as the first African American woman and only the third American woman to publish a book of poems. . . . [H]er first collection of poems, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral--[was] the first book written by an enslaved Black woman in America. It included a forward by John Hancock and other Boston notables--as well as a portrait of Wheatley--all designed to prove that the work was indeed written by a Black woman. . . . In 1778, Wheatley married John Peters, a free black man from Boston with whom she had three children, though none survived. Efforts to publish a second book of poems failed. To s