Effie Lee Newsome's poetry appears beside that of Langston Hughes, Frank Horne, and Countee Cullen in Crisis and Phylon, journals edited by W. E. B. Du Bois. Anthologized by Hughes, Cullen, Arna Bontemps, and Arnold Adoff, Effie Lee Newsome is virtually unknown today. During the 1940s, after the publication of Gladiola Garden (1940), Newsome became known as a nature poet for children, and her reputation, or lack of it, generally rests on that label.

Mary Effie Lee was born 19 January 1885 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Mary Elizabeth Ashe Lee and Benjamin Franklin Lee. A clergyman, Benjamin Lee was chief editor of the Christian Recorder, the official publication of the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) church. She lived the first seven years of her life in Philadelphia, not many miles from the Gouldtown, New Jersey, settlement that her father's free-black ancestors had founded in the eighteenth century and where her...