"My authoress is a colored lady, a member of my church, of pleasing piety and modest worth," wrote James W. C. Pennington, one of the most celebrated African American ministers and abolitionists in Hartford, Connecticut. That statement in his preface to Ann Plato's Essays; Including Biographies and Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Poetry (1841) provides nearly all the available biographical information about her. Ann Plato was the first African American to publish a collection of essays, and the twenty works in her only book, on topics such as "Religion," "Education," "Diligence and Negligence," and "Obedience," offer little specific biographical information. As Kenny J. Williams attests in her introduction to the modern edition of Plato's volume, "[I]n the absence of contemporaneous documents, attempting to reconstruct a life is as difficult as trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack."

Ann Plato likely belonged to what Barbara Jean Beeching...