I lived from 1875-1935.
I was influenced by poets Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson.
Alice Ruth Moore was born in New Orleans, Louisiana on July 19, 1875. Her father was Joseph Moore, a merchant marine and her mother was Patricia Wright, a seamstress. She was of a mixed heritage of white, black and Creole Indian. She was very light complexioned, often passed for white. She had reddish-blonde baby curls and a fair complexion. She was sometimes frustrated in her relations with darker-skinned African Americans. She graduated from a two year teaching program at Straight University (now Dillard University) in 1892 and started work as a teacher in the public school system of New Orleans. She also studied at Cornell University, Columbia University , and the University of Pennsylvania where she specialized in psychology and English educational testing. She taught in public schools throughout her life
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When Alice was 20, she published "Violets and Other Tales: in 1895. She married Paul Laurence Dunbar after a correspondence courtship. It began after Dunbar saw her picture accompanying one of her poems published in 1897. They were married in a secret ceremony on March 6, 1898, in New York. At the time she was teaching at the White Rose Mission (it was later called, the White Rose Home for Girls in Harlem), which she helped to found. After the wedding, they moved to Washington, D.C.. Their marriage ended in 1902 and she moved to Wilmington, Delaware, where she taught at Howard High School Alice never saw Paul again, but she continued to publish under the name of Alice Dunbar even after he died in 1906. In the second of three marriages, she secretly married Henry Callis, in 1910, who was a fellow teacher, but they were divorced a year later. She married Robert Nelson, a journalist in 1916. Alice was bisexual and her husband threw tantrums over her lesbian affairs, but they remained married until her death.
Alice Dunbar-Nelson held many positions throughout her life she was a teacher, stenographer, executive secretary, editor, newspaper columnist, platform speaker, and campaign manager. She was an activist involved with African America and women’s rights and the Harlem Renaissance. She helped found the Industrial School for Colored Girls. From 1913 to 1914, she was coeditor and writer for the A.M.E. Review, she coedited the Wilmington Advocate and published The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer, which was a literary anthology for black audiences in 1920. Her prose outweighed her poetry, but it’s her poetry that has kept her reputation alive.
Alice Dunbar-Nelson counted Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, W.E.B. DuBois, and Mary McLeod Bethune as friends and associates. She died on September 18, 1935 of heart failure.
My poetry
I had no thought of violets of late,
The wild, shy kind that spring beneath your feet
13 lines
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