Fauset, Jessie R.

Fauset, Jessie R. (Redmon) (1882–1961) writer; born in Fredericksville, N.J. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell University and studied at the Sorbonne, Paris. She had a long career teaching high school in Washington, D.C., and New York, later joining the faculty of the Hampton Institute (1949). As literary editor of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's magazine Crisis (1919–26), she was influential in promoting black Francophone and Harlem Renaissance writers. She wrote four novels (1924–34) featuring strong black heroines, and herself was one of the first African-American women to receive recognition as an intellectual.