Georgia Douglas Johnson

Georgia Douglas Johnson (1877–1966) was the best known and most widely published African American woman poet of her time, as well as a playwright and journalist. In 1893 she graduated from the Normal School of Atlanta University and, after teaching school in Atlanta and nearby Marietta, she attended Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio. In 1916 Crisis featured Johnson’s first published poetry, and two book-length collections of her verse soon followed: The Heart of a Woman (1918) and Bronze (1922). Although her popularity peaked in the 1920s, over the next few decades Johnson also wrote songs, short stories, a biography of her late husband, and several other works which were salvaged from her house after her death, along with a “Catalogue of Writings” that documented the quantity and breadth of her unpublished work. (Inducted in 2010)