Alice Dunbar

Violets and Other Tales (Dodo Press) Alice Dunbar

Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar Nelson (1875-1935) was an American poet, journalist and political activist. She was one of the prominent African Americans involved in the Harlem Renaissance. Her first husband was the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar; she then married physician Henry A. Callis; and last married Robert J. Nelson, another poet. Moore graduated from Straight University in 1892 and started work as a teacher in the public school system of New Orleans. In 1895 her first collection of short stories and poems, Violets and Other Tales, was published by The Monthly Review. About that time she moved to New York. She was teaching at the White Rose Mission in Harlem, which she had co-founded. From 1913 to 1914, Dunbar was co-editor and writer for the A. M. E. Review, an influential church publication produced by the African Methodist Episcopal Church. From 1920, she co-edited the Wilmington Advocate newspaper and published The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer. In 1915 she was field organizer for the Middle Atlantic states for the woman's suffrage movement. In 1918 she was field representative for the Woman's Committee of the Council of Defense.