Lula Lowe Weeden

Lula Lowe Weeden (later, Lula Lowe Weeden Campbell and Lula Lowe Weeden Jacobs) was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, on February 4, 1918. She was one of three daughters born to Lula L. Weeden, who was also a poet, and Dr. Henry P. Weeden, a dentist. The Weedens lived on a property adjoining that of Anne Spencer and her family. According to Spencer’s son, Chauncey, Weeden spent a great deal of time with his mother, seeking advice about how to improve her poetry.

Weeden published work in Countee Cullen’s Caroling Dusk when she was only nine years old. By that time, Weeden had written thirty to forty short poems. She published three in the May 1927 issue of Opportunity magazine, as part of a feature article about her written by Cullen. She stopped writing poetry in her early teens. 

As an adult, Weeden was acquainted with anthropologist Irene Diggs, scholar and anthologist Alain Locke, and W. E. B. Du Bois. According to a letter Weeden wrote to Diggs, Weeden studied under Du Bois for a time and planned to write a story based on him titled “The Man Who Built His Classroom.” Though she still occasionally wrote prose, she devoted herself to a career in art education in Denver. Her poems were anthologized in the U.S. in the 1940s and again in the Netherlands in the 1950s. 

Lula Lowe Weeden Jacobs died in Denver on June 22, 2013.