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Henrietta Cordelia Ray (August 30, 1852 - 1916) was an African-American poet and teacher. She was the sister of Charlotte E. Ray. She was born in New York City to Charlotte Augusta Burrough and clergyman, abolitionist, and newspaper publisher Charles B. Ray, and named for his first wife, Henrietta Ray.

In 1891 Cordelia graduated from the University of the City of New York with a master's in pedagogy. She also studied French, German, Greek and Latin at the Saveneur School of Languages. She became a schoolteacher, but stopped teaching in order to write.

Ray's ode "Lincoln" was read at the unveiling of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C in April 1876. A memoir of her father, written with her sister Florence, was published by J.J. Little & Co. in 1887. Her Sonnets were printed, also by Little, in 1893, and her Poems were published in 1910.

Ray died in 1916.

Sonnets

Ray published a volume of poetry entitled Sonnets in 1893 including sonnets on Milton, Shakespeare, Raphael, and Beethoven. Ray's work was republished widely in anthologies in the early twentieth century and has re-emerged in scholarship of the twenty-first century. The opening verses to her poem on Milton are indicative of her highly romantic tone offered as: "O POET gifted with the sight divine !/ To thee 'twas given Eden's groves to pace/ With that first pair, in whom the human race/ Their kinship claim : and angels did incline —/ Great Michael, holy Gabriel — to twine".

Publications

• Sketch of the life of Rev. Charles B. Ray. New York: Press of J.J. Little & Co., 1887
• Sonnets. New York: Press of J.J. Little & Co., 1893
• Poems. New York: Grafton Press, 1910

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References

1. Brown, Hallie Q. “Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction.” Aldine Publishing Company, Xenia Ohio, 1926
2. Osborne, Tonya Michelle. "Charlotte E. Ray: A Black Woman Lawyer" (PDF). Stanford Law School. Retrieved 30 April 2014.
3. "Henrietta Ray". African American Registry. Retrieved April 26, 2014.
4. Ray, Florence; Ray, Henrietta Cordelia (1887). Sketch of the Life of the Rev. Charles B. Ray. J.J. Little. Retrieved April 26, 2014.
5. Jesse Fauset, “What to Read,” The Crisis 4:4 (August 1912): 183.
6. Looney, Dennis, Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy. University of Notre Dame Press, 2011.
7. Antonella Francini, “Sonnet vs. Sonnet: The Fourteen Lines in African American Poetry” RSA Journal 14/2003. 45.
8. Sonnets. New York: Press of J.J. Little & Co., 1893

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• 1852 births
• 1916 deaths
• African-American poets
• African-American women writers
• African-American schoolteachers
• African-American activists
• People from New York City
• New York University alumni
• American biographers
• American women poets
• Women biographers