Mae Virginia Cowdery

A 1927 portrait of Krigwa Prize (annual literary contest The Crisis ran accepting submissions for fiction, essays, verse, and plays) winner Mae V. Cowdery at age 19. Image comes from W.E.B. DuBois' January 1928 edition of The Crisis Magazine.

Born in Philadelphia on January 10, 1909, Mae Virginia Cowdery was the only child of a social worker mother, who was an assistant director of the Bureau for Colored Children, and a postal worker/caterer father, Lemuel Cowdery. She attended the Philadelphia High School for Girls. While she was onlya high school senior in 1927, she published three poems in Black Opals, a Philadelphia journal, and won first prize in a poetry contest run by The Crisis for “Longings.” That same year, she won the Krigwa Prize for “Lamps.”

After graduation, Cowdery came to New York in 1927 to attend the Pratt Institute, although the school records show no evidence of her attendance until 1931. She frequented the cabarets of Harlem and Greenwich Village, where she lived. A photograph of her published by The Crisis in 1928 reveals a young woman of unusual beauty, style, and originality, with a bow tie, tailored jacket, and very short hair. Widely published in the late 1920s in The Crisis, Cowdery was one of the few women of the Harlem Renaissance to bring out a volume of her own work, We Lift Our Voices and Other Poems (1936), with a glowing foreword by William Stanley Braithwaite, who termed her “a fugitive poet.”

Cowdery’s poetry was said to be inspired by Edna St. Vincent Millay, whom she may have known during her years in the Village, and much of it recalls the imagism of Angelina Weld Grimké and other Modernist poets of her day. Above all, Cowdery’s poems are sensual, erotic, and openly lustful, with several written to female lovers. Although her poetry from the mid-thirties suggests Cowdery had a daughter, no mention is made of a marriage or children in the scanty biographical material about her. In spite of winning honors at an early age and receiving encouragement from Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Benjamin Brawley, and others, Cowdery fell into obscurity after 1936.

Poet Jessie Fauset’s brother, Arthur Huff Fauset, who knew her in Philadelphia, called her “a flame that burned out rapidly . . . a flash in the pan with great potential who just wouldn’t settle down.” Critic Richard Long, who met her in the early 1950s, observed, “She seemed a bright intelligence made bored and restless by her surroundings.”

In 1953 Mae Cowdery committed suicide in New York City at the age of 44.

Shadowed Dreams
Mae V. Cowdery (1909–1953)
Rutgers University Press | 2006

Source: Vincent Jubilee, “Philadelphia’s Afro-American Literary Circle and the Harlem Renaissance” [PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1980]