For more than two centuries, the story of Phillis Wheatley ended the way her enslavers' records ended it: with a teenage prodigy, a book of poems, and then silence. The woman who in 1773 became the first person of African descent to publish a book of poetry in English was known to history mostly through the household that owned her, the Boston merchant John Wheatley and his wife Susanna, who purchased her off a slave ship in 1761 and named her for the vessel that carried her. What happened after she was freed, after she married, after she tried to build a life in a new nation that had just declared its own liberty, was largely a blank.
On October 5, 2026, a 35-minute documentary screening at Watson Library on the University of Kansas campus sets out to fill that blank. "In Search of Phillis Wheatley Peters," directed by Leslie Askew and produced by Askew Pictures, centers on a chapter of Wheatley Peters' life that scholars long treated as a footnote: her 1778 marriage to John Peters, a free Black man, entrepreneur, and advocate, and the deliberate choices she made in pursuit of autonomy, dignity, and love. The screening is free and open to the public, co-sponsored by KU's Department of English and its Department of African and African-American Studies, and a Q&A follows the film.
The documentary rests on research that made national news in 2021. Cornelia Dayton, a historian at the University of Connecticut, published an article in the New England Quarterly titled "Lost Years Recovered: John Peters and Phillis Wheatley Peters in Middleton," drawing on a cache of Essex County legal papers to account for three years of the poet's life that had gone missing from the record. As Dayton explained in an interview with Public Seminar, the biography had always been told through the Wheatleys' documents, and then it simply had holes in it. She married John Peters, Dayton noted, and lived another four years, but almost nothing was known about Peters before the marriage, about the marriage itself, or about how the couple fared.
The legal papers revealed that when the couple left Boston in 1780, they moved to Middleton, Massachusetts, where John Peters became a landowner on a farm where he himself had once been enslaved. It was, in Dayton's reading, an attempt to give his celebrated young wife something like a writer's life, and it may have failed. The couple confronted poverty, racism, and legal precarity in a society that offered little protection to Black families in the aftermath of the Revolution. John Peters found himself in legal trouble and at one point landed in debtor's prison. Phillis could not gather support for a second book of poems and worked in a boarding house to help support the family. The couple had three children, none of whom survived. Wheatley Peters died on December 5, 1784, at about 31 years old, and was buried with her third child in an unmarked grave somewhere in Boston.
Even her name is part of the recovery. Literary scholars and the schools named for her still call her Phillis Wheatley, but in the last four years of her life she signed her letters Phillis Peters. As Dayton put it, perhaps we should pay more attention to the Peters part of her life. The film takes that instruction seriously, reframing her not only as a foundational literary figure but as an abolitionist navigating the political, economic, and racial constraints of Revolutionary-era Boston, and as a woman whose intellectual, emotional, and political choices continue to resonate.
The documentary is a hybrid work, blending archival materials, interviews with leading scholars, poets, and cultural historians, and reenactments. Among those who appear is Kabria Baumgartner, a historian and Newburyport resident whom Askew interviewed on a visit to that city. The film has been on a university and cultural institution tour across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe. Its U.S. premiere took place on February 26, 2026, at the Museum of African American History in Boston, where Askew reported a turnout beyond anything the filmmakers had hoped for. From there it traveled to venues including Northeastern University, TCU, Salem State, the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, and the Museum of Old Newbury, whose screening was folded into Massachusetts 250 programming because the film highlights Wheatley Peters' belief in the Revolutionary cause and the era's unfinished promises of liberty. The tour arrives in Lawrence in the fall, in the 250th anniversary year of the Declaration of Independence, a fitting moment for a film about a woman who took the language of liberty literally.
The KU event is a rare kind of history: a first-of-its-kind documentary, grounded in newly uncovered documents, that anyone can walk into for free. It runs from 7 to 8 p.m. at Watson Library, 1425 Jayhawk Boulevard. The film is 35 minutes; the conversation afterward is the point. What emerges is not a literary prodigy shaped by others but a woman who, in the last years of a short life, chose her own name, her own partner, and her own terms.