Alice Dunbar Nelson

Alice Dunbar Nelson was born in New Orleans in 1875. Of mixed descent, she grew up amongst Creole society and her upbringing informs much of her fiction. She graduated as a teacher and taught in schools through much of her life. She was also a published poet, journalist, public speaker and activist and she became a key figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Her first book, an anthology of prose and poetry, Violets and Other Tales, was published in 1895 and her acclaimed short story collection, The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories, followed in 1897. Her first marriage, to the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, was short. She remarried twice, first to Arthur Callis, a doctor, and then to journalist and politician Robert J. Nelson. She died in Philadelphia in 1935.