Anne Spencer is not widely known to readers of the present generation, perhaps because she published few of her poems during her life and never published a volume of her poetry or other writings. Nevertheless, the quality of the poetry she produced, the cultural and social circumstances under which she wrote, and her association with and influence on writers and others of the Harlem Renaissance period give her an important place in the literary, social, and cultural history of twentieth-century black America.

Anne Spencer was the name under which her poems were published and by which the public knew her after the early 1920s. She was born Annie Bethel Scales Bannister on 6 February 1882 on a farm in Henry County, Virginia. An only child, she spent the first few years of her childhood in Henry County with her parents, Sarah Louise and Joel Cephus Bannister. Sarah and Joel, who...