I sit and sew / a useless task it seems / My hands grown tired / My head weighed down with dreams. — Alice Dunbar Nelson (image via Encyclopedia of Louisiana) In the diaries she kept for all her life, Alice Dunbar Nelson recorded 60-plus years of experiences — about her life as a mixed-race woman, as wife to the famous poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (and a poet in her own right), as a woman who had affairs with other women, and as a documentarian of black experience in the late 19th century. Today, her essays, poems and short stories are taught in school. But it's her diaries — the near-obsessive recording of her thoughts and dreams about contemporary politics — that stand out as special.
A Woman to Know: Alice Dunbar Nelson
A Woman to Know: Alice Dunbar Nelson
A Woman to Know: Alice Dunbar Nelson
I sit and sew / a useless task it seems / My hands grown tired / My head weighed down with dreams. — Alice Dunbar Nelson (image via Encyclopedia of Louisiana) In the diaries she kept for all her life, Alice Dunbar Nelson recorded 60-plus years of experiences — about her life as a mixed-race woman, as wife to the famous poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (and a poet in her own right), as a woman who had affairs with other women, and as a documentarian of black experience in the late 19th century. Today, her essays, poems and short stories are taught in school. But it's her diaries — the near-obsessive recording of her thoughts and dreams about contemporary politics — that stand out as special.