Henrietta Cordelia Ray

Henrietta Cordelia Ray (August 30, 1852- ) was an African-American poet and teacher.

Life
Ray was born in [[New York City, one of seven children of Charlotte Augusta (Burrough) and Charles B. Ray, a blacksmith and Congregational minister and a leading abolitionist. She graduated from the  University of the City of New York in 1891, and the Sauvener School of Languages.  She taught in the New York City public school system for many years.

She first won public attention in 1876 with her poem "Lincoln: Written for the Occasion of the Unveiling of the Freedmen's Monument in Memory of Abraham Lincoln," which was publicly read at the unveiling of the monument in April 1876.

Her first published book was a collaboration with her sister Florence, a biography of their father. "Sketch of the Life of Rev. Charles B. Ray," which appeared in 1887, was widely praised.

Her first book of poetry, Sonnets was published in 1893. The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing describes its 12 poems as "Petrarchan sonnets ... on topics such as Niobe, life, aspiration, self-mastery, Shakespeare, Milton, Beethoven, and Raphael. Unfortunately, there are very few verses that display any complexity or innovation."

A second volume, Poems (which included Sonnets) was published in 1910. This was a more ambitious collection of 145 poems.

Ray was widely praised in her time. Ray was praised extensively by her contemporaries for her refined manners and classical learning. In 1926 Hallie Quinn Brown, writing in Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction, remarked on her “versatility, love of nature, classical knowledge, delicate fancy, and unaffected piety."

Recognition
Her volume of Poems was reprinted in 1978 in Collected Black Women's Poetry, volume 3 of the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers (1988).

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She died in 1915.