Mae Cowdery

Mae Virginia Cowdery was born in Philadelphia on January 10, 1909. She published three poems while still in her teens, including “Goal,” which appeared in the Philadelphia-based journal Black Opals in 1927. She graduated from Philadelphia High School for Girls, also the alma mater of Jessie Redmon Fauset, in 1927 then moved to New York City. 

While in New York, Cowdery enrolled at the Pratt Institute and regularly visited cabarets in Harlem and Greenwich Village where she gained a reputation for her androgynous personal style. She befriended key Harlem Renaissance figures who encouraged her writing, including Langston Hughes and Alain Locke. 

Cowdery won first prize in a poetry contest hosted by The Crisis in addition to later receiving the magazine’s Krigwa Poetry Prize in 1927 for another poem. Some of her poems were anthologized in Ebony and Topaz: A Collectanea (National Urban League, 1927), edited by Charles S. Johnson. She published a single poetry volume during her lifetime, titled We Lift Our Voices and Other Poems (Alpress, 1936). Her work fell into obscurity shortly thereafter. Cowdery died of suicide in New York City in 1953.