An acclaimed writer is returning to Dorchester and Boston—after an absence of some 230 years. Actress Valerie Fox will portray Phillis Wheatley, a Colonial Boston slave whose quill turned her into a renowned bard who would become the first black poetess published in America. Fox will welcome guests to connect with Wheatley through her portrayal starting next Saturday ( Jan. 21, 10 a.m.-1 p.m.) at the Great Hall in Codman Square. The event— co-sponsored by the Dorchester Historical Society and Codman Square Neighborhood Council— will continue on two subsequent Saturdays, Jan. 28 and Feb. 2.

In the spring of 1772, wealthy Bostonians John and Susannah Wheatley sent a frail teenage girl to the fresh air of the countryside, hoping that the change of locale would spare her from maladies afflicting Bostonians. During her stay in the country, which for many locals was Dorchester, she grew stronger. Her name was Phillis Wheatley, her surname reflecting that she was the property of the Wheatleys.

Susannah Wheatley first spied the girl, who was born around 1753 in Senegal (or Gambia, according to some accounts), on the auction block of Boston’s slave market one day in 1761. She and John purchased her and brought her to their comfortable house on King Street. They named her Phillis.

Susannah was preoccupied with the girl’s fragile health, and as the days passed, the Wheatleys and their teenage twins, Mary and Nathaniel, began to view the young African as if she were an adopted child, not a slave. The twins taught Phillis to read and write English.

By the time she was in her mid-teens, the family realized she was a prodigy as she began composing poetry that teemed with Biblical and classical imagery.

In 1767, the thirteen-year-old slave penned her first poem of note: “To the University of Cambridge [Harvard].” It criticized the nemesis of neighborhoods past and present – rowdy college students. She referred to herself in the poem as an “Ethiop.”

Her quill soon penned the poems “On Friendship” and “On Atheism.” In 1769, her verses for “On the Death on Mr. Seider, Murder’d by Richardson” were inspired by the tragic death of a youth named Christopher Seider who had been cut down by a Tory customs official named Richardson. Many eulogized the unfortunate Seider as the first Patriot martyr.

In 1770, at a spot a short distance from her owners’ front stoop, the Boston Massacre erupted, deeply affecting her. Another 1770 event, the death of the famed preacher George Whitefield, compelled her to write an elegy that paid tribute to the cleric, who had asserted that God’s salvation was for blacks as well as whites. She signed her work “Phillis, a Servant girl of seventeen years of Age, Belong to Mr. J. Wheatley…but 9 years in this Country from Africa.”

John Wheatley paid for Phillis’s elegiac to be sold on broadsides through an advertisement in the Massachusetts Spy. By 1772, Phillis was gathering her poems into a book. Her owners decided to publish them with an English printer and sent her to London with Nathaniel to put her work together.

They returned in October 1773. Her book, “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral,” would follow. Then, with a swiftness the poetess could have likened to the Greek tragedies she had read, Susannah Wheatley died in March 1774.

For Phillis, the loss of the woman who had been more mother than owner was incalculable. John Wheatley died a few years after his wife, but not before he had had freed the poetess.

Shortly after the Battle of Bunker Hill, on June 17, 1775, Phillis fled from Boston to Providence, Rhode Island, and the Patriots’ cause conjured words from her quill. She sent a letter and a poem to General George Washington in October 1775. Some historians contend that she actually met him, but the jury remains out on that story.

By 1778 Wheatley was back in Boston, finding that life for ex-slaves was not easy. She was married that year to a freed slave named John Peters, but when Peters was reportedly jailed for failure to pay his debts, a common enough ordeal for many men of the day, white or black, Phillis took a job at a local boardinghouse to support her children (she had three, with two dying at early ages). Her always-tenuous health eroded from the physical and emotional strains of her life.

Despite all, Phillis kept writing, her work occasionally appearing in various pamphlets, but she could not find a publisher for her second book of poems. Her byline appeared for the final time in September 1784, her poem’s theme from her own experience – the death of a baby.

The Massachusetts Centinel ran a small announcement on Dec. 8, 1784: “Last Lord’s day died, Mrs.

Phillis Peters, aged 31, known to the literary world by her celebrated miscellaneous Poems.” In an unmarked grave were buried the remains of the slave-poetess and one of her children.