Naomi nelson duke university

By Aaron Welborn

By almost any definition, Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral is an important book. Published in 1773, it is the first book authored by an African American—not to mention the first by a slave and only the third by an American woman.

Duke University owns a precious first edition signed by the author herself.

On a recent afternoon, Naomi Nelson was explaining why this particular autographed copy is not only special, but truly one-of-a-kind.

Nelson is the new director of Duke’s Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library—or RBMSCL for short. Her job is to oversee a trove of rare and unique scholarly treasures, from two-thousand-year-old papyri to digital files created yesterday, the primary stuff of research.

It’s a big job, but one that comes with frequent rewarding surprises, like getting to hold a fragile connection to history in your own hands.

Nelson pointed out that Wheatley wasn̵