Jupiter Hammon spent his whole life enslaved by one family, the Lloyds, who owned a large estate at Lloyd’s Neck on the north shore of Long Island. He was unusual in that household and in his time: he was taught to read and write, he kept accounts for the family’s business, and he was allowed to buy books. Most of what he read was the Bible and the hymns and sermons of the Great Awakening, the wave of revivals that swept the colonies in the 1740s, and that is the music you hear in his verse.

His first known poem, “An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ with Penitential Cries,” is dated Christmas Day, 1760. It was printed as a broadside, a single sheet meant to be posted or passed hand to hand, and it made him the first African American writer to be published in what would become the United States. It reads like a hymn, with a steady beat and a refrain-like return to the word “salvation,” and it was almost certainly meant to be sung or read aloud.

During the Revolution the Lloyds fled to Hartford, Connecticut, and Hammon went with them. There, in 1778, he published a poem addressed to Phillis Wheatley, the young enslaved poet in Boston whose book had made her famous on both sides of the Atlantic. He never met her, as far as we know, but he wrote to her as one believer to another, and as the only other Black poet in print.

His last major work, An Address to the Negroes in the State of New-York (1787), is hard to read today. Hammon, then in his seventies, told older enslaved people to be patient and obedient. But he also wrote that he hoped the young would be set free, and that liberty was a great thing. For a man still enslaved, writing under his enslaver’s eye, even that was saying a good deal.

Nobody knows exactly when Hammon died, only that it was some time before 1806, and no picture of him is known to exist. In 1970, a folk musician named Stanley Ransom proposed marking his birthday as Black Poetry Day, and schools and libraries around the country still do.