An engaged crowd welcomed David Waldstreicher, celebrated author and historian of early and nineteenth-century America to discuss his latest work, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence about the enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley in conversation with author and poet Iain Haley Pollock, Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Manhattanville College. David’s latest book has been called the most deeply researched biography of the poet. Watch the full video of their conversation here.
David Waldstreicher is also the author of Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (2009); Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution (2004); and In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (1997). As editor, his books include Revolutions and Reconstructions: Black Politics in the Long Nineteenth Century (2020); the Library of America edition of The Diaries of John Quincy Adams (2017); Beyond the Founders; New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (2004); and The Struggle Against Slavery: A History in Documents (2001). His scholarly articles and books have won prizes from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, the, Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the American Jewish Historical Society. He has also written for the Boston Review, Atlantic.com and the New York Times Book Review.
Waldstreicher is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society and the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, New York Public Library; the American Philosophical Society; and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, among others. Before coming to the Graduate Center, he taught at Temple University, University of Notre Dame, Yale University and Bennington College.
Iain Haley Pollock is the author of three poetry collections, “Spit Back a Boy” (2011), “Ghost, Like a Place” (Alice James Books, 2018), and the forthcoming “All the Possible Bodies” (Alice James, September 2025). His poems have appeared in numerous other publications, ranging from American Poetry Review and The Kenyon Review to The New York Times Magazine and The Progressive. Pollock has received several honors for his work including the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Poetry, the Bim Ramke Prize for Poetry from Denver Quarterly, and a nomination for an NAACP Image Award. He directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Manhattanville University in Purchase, New York.
