This brief overview of the changing face of America in the 1700s includes a biography of Wheatley.

America's First Black Woman Poet
http://www.it.cc.mn.us/literature/wheat.htm

This course site from Ithaca Community College Distance Learning includes a biography of Wheatley and excerpts of her work.

African American Literature Book Club
http://www.aalbc.com/phyllis.htm

This site includes a biography of Wheatley and an e-text of "To the Students at the University of Cambridge in New England."

BIOGRAPHY
Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753-1784) was kidnapped from Africa and sold in the Boston slave market in 1761, so the true year of her birth will always be a mystery. She was bought by Susanna Wheatley, a woman of some means, and welcomed more as a new member of the Wheatley household than as a slave. Phillis was precocious and quickly learned English and Latin. She began writing when she was still only a young girl, and her earliest surviving poem was written in 1767, when she was twelve or thirteen. She was formally freed by the Wheatley family when she was about twenty but remained with them until her marriage to John Peters, a free black man, in 1778.

At the same time, she tried newspaper advertisements to solicit enough subscribers to publish a collection of her poems, but when skepticism over her racial background made this impossible, Susanna Wheatley arranged for the poems to be published in London in 1773. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral is the first book known to be published by an African American. There were at least four printings of the book in London the first year, but the publication sold poorly in Boston, again because of resistance to Wheatley's race. She was trying to gather enough subscribers for a new collection when she was suddenly taken ill and died in 1784.