Mae Virginia Cowdery

Mae Virginia (or Valentine) Cowdery (January 10, 1909 – November 2, 1948) was an African-American poet based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is considered part of the wide-ranging artistic efforts inspired by the Harlem Renaissance in New York City.

Biography Cowdery was born in 1909 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was the only child of upwardly mobile parents; her mother was a social worker and an assistant director of the Bureau for Colored Children (later the Bureau for Child Care); her father Lemuel Cowdery was a caterer and United States postal worker. Cowdery discovered her talent for poetry as a child. She graduated from the prestigious Philadelphia High School for Girls and attended Pratt Institute in New York to study fashion design but did not graduate. While attending Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, she frequented night places in Greenwich Village. The group did not succeed in building a large enough audience for the journal, and published it only into 1928.

Cowdery won first prize in a 1927 poetry contest from The Crisis for her poem "Longings"; another poem won the Krigwa Prize.

Works "Farewell" (1929, poem) We Lift Our Voices: And Other Poems, 1936