Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Harriet Jacobs was born in Edenton, North Carolina, in 1813, to slave parents. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl , the first full-length narrative written by a former slave woman in America, is a record of events and experiences of slavery seen through the eyes of the young Harriet during the years she lived in captivity in Edenton, through her escape, when she becomes a fugitive in the North at age twenty-nine, and concluding soon after a northern white friend buys her freedom in 1852. Evie Shockley is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University and the author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry . For her poetry collections―including suddenly we, semiautomatic, the new black , and a half-red sea ―she has been awarded the Shelley Memorial Award, the Lannan Literary Award, and the Holmes National Poetry Prize, has twice won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, has received an NAACP Image Award, and has been named a finalist for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the LA Times Book Prize. She has served as an editor of jubilat and Feminist Studies , and is Editor for Poetry at Contemporary Literature .