Evangelical Christianity gave Phillis the means, motive, and opportunity to become a poet. She was writing poetry by 1765, a mere four years after she arrived in America. The poems she wrote in the next few years display an almost incredibly rapid improvement in her skills in versification. As a recently converted “Ethiop” she assumes the role of a lay preacher. Phillis experimented with various literary forms, such as allegory, as well as with rhyme patterns besides the rhymed couplets she uses in almost all her later poems. In response to the growing tensions between Britain and its North American colonies during the 1760s, Phillis began writing overtly political poems, creating what I call a proto-national American voice. Phillis’s persona alternates between identifying as African and as American in Phillis’s elegy on the death of George Whitefield in 1770. She uses the occasion to address contemporaneous religious and political issues. Republication of her elegy brought Phillis transatlantic recognition.