In 1867, Frances Anne Rollin, a Black writer and teacher from South Carolina, traveled to Boston to seek a publisher for her biography of famed Black abolitionist, writer, and Civil War veteran Martin R. Delany. Beginning in January 1868, Rollin kept a diary while in Boston documenting her progression on Delany’s biography, negotiations with publishers, visits from friends, attendance at lectures and readings, and her marriage to William J. Whipper, a Black politician and jurist. Rollin’s diary is one of the earliest known diaries by a Southern Black woman. In this critical edition Jennifer Putzi offers the first complete transcription and annotation of Rollin’s diary, along with a robust introduction providing important biographical, historical, cultural, and literary contexts for readers. Rollin’s diary provides one of the fullest pictures of an African American woman as an author, activist, and well-connected and politically involved individual during the Reconstruction era—filling a gap in the literature and scholarly analysis of such preserved works by nineteenth-century African American women.

About the Speaker

Jennifer Putzi is a Professor of English and Gender, Sexuality, & Women’s Studies at William & Mary. Her research and teaching are broadly focused on nineteenth-century American women’s writing. She is the author or editor of seven books, including most recently The Reconstruction Diary of Frances Anne Rollin: A Critical Edition (2025) and Fair Copy: Gender, Relational Poetics, and Antebellum American Women’s Poetry (2021). Her current research is on nineteenth-century African American women’s diaries and the relationship between material format and content in Black women’s everyday writing. Professor Putzi’s book-in-progress, titled Making Space: Geography and Material Form in African American Women’s Diaries, considers the way nineteenth-century Black women diarists use their diaries to negotiate, claim, and map geographical space as gardeners, travelers, city dwellers, and invalids. Along with Professor Kirsten Lee of Auburn University, Putzi is also Project Co-Director of the Black Women’s Diaries Project, a digital humanities project that scans, transcribes, annotates, and encodes manuscript diaries written by African American women between 1854 and 1905. The BWDP site will launch in the fall of 2026, with the 1902 diary of Norfolk resident Florence Barber.