Alice Dunbar -Nelson

Violets and Other Tales (1895) by Alice Dunbar -Nelson

Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar Nelson (July 19, 1875 - September 18, 1935) was an American poet, journalist and political activist. Among the first generation born free in the South after the Civil War, she was one of the prominent African Americans involved in the artistic flourishing of 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, a poet and civil rights activist. Alice Ruth Moore was born in New Orleans on July 19, 1875, the daughter of an African-American seamstress and former slave and a white seaman. Her parents, Patricia Wright and Joseph Moore, were middle-class people of color and part of the traditional multiracial Creole community of the city.