I Sit and Sew

While she only lived in New York City for a short time, Alice Moor3e Dunbar-Nelson holds a particular place among the precursors to the Harlem Renaissance. Years before their marriage, Dunbar-Nelson and Paul Laurence Dunbar corresponded, and though Dunbar may have seen Dunbar-Nelson as more of a muse than a collaborator, he was inspired by both her beauty and her literary talent. Dunbar grew up in Kentucky and following a celebrated high school career and early publishing, he was forced to take work as an elevator operator. In Alice Moore—as she was known when they met—Dunbar found another talented young Black person publishing her work and continuing her education. As a Creole woman, Dunbar-Nelson’s identity gave her a much more fluid perspective on race, as well as the courage to unflinchingly address questions of race.

The Dunbars were literary celebrities, but his physical abuse was such a threat to her survival, Dunbar-Nelson left Dunbar and New York City for Delaware. Even at that distance, her work appeared in Harlem Renaissance publications such as The Crisis. She maintained friends like W.E.B. Dubois, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen—who published one of Dunbar-Nelson’s poems in his anthology Caroling Dusk. While Dunbar’s work is often seen as a herald of the more groundbreaking work of future Black artists, his depictions of dialect and reverence for the natural world prefigure writers like Zora Neale Hurston.