Frances Harper Poems Prose and Sketches 2021 is a collection of writing by Frances Harper. Harper the first African American woman to publish a novel gained a reputation as a popular poet and impassioned abolitionist in the decades leading up to the American Civil War. Much of her work was rediscovered in the twentieth century and preserved for its significance to some of the leading social movements of the nineteenth century including temperance abolition and womens suffrage. As an artist for whom the personal was always political Frances Harper served in a leadership role at the Womens Christian Temperance Union and worked to establish the National Association of Colored Women serving for a time as vice president of the organization. Included in this volume are extracts of her early poetry volumes including Forest Leaves 1845 and Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects 1854. In Bury Me in Free Land an influential poem published in an 1858 edition of abolitionist newspaper The AntiSlavery Bugle Harper expresses her commitment to the cause of freedom in life or death terms I ask no monument proud and high To arrest the gaze of the passersby All that my yearning spirit craves Is bury me not in a land of slaves. She reflects on the theme of freedom throughout her body of work often examining her own identity or experiences as a free Black woman alongside the lives of her enslaved countrymen. In Free Work she looks to something as simple as her own clothing and examines its connectionor lack thereofto the institution of slavery I wear an easy garment Oer it no toiling slave Wept tears of hopeless anguish In his passage to the grave. Reflecting on the horrors of slavery through the lens of the everyday Harper refuses to take for granted the significance of freedom in all of its manifestations a reality which is sometimes as simple as the clothes on her back. In these poems and speeches from across her lengthy career as an artist and activist Harper not only dedicates hers