Praisesong for Margaret Walker’s Jubilee and the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival

In 1973, Margaret Walker transformed Phillis Wheatley into the rebirth of Black women’s poetry via an eponymous poetry festival, an extension of a praxis she had been refining in her 1966 novel Jubilee since its inception in 1934. By understanding Phillis’s story to be as celebratory as the passed-down stories of Margaret’s maternal ancestors in Jubilee, Margaret empowered an entire generation of Black women poets, including herself, to frame Black feminist literature as a collective praxis of cross-generational time travel. Margaret’s work demonstrated that Black women’s acts of remembrance and gratitude are songs of liberation worthy of their own praise.