She was born in Boston, Massachusetts to a biracial family whose members included both slaveowners and abolitionists. She attended the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics, and after graduating, she moved to Washington, DC with her father. She got a job teaching English at Armstrong Manual Training school in 1902, which she left in 1916, to teach at Dunbar High School. In addition, she now spent her summers as a student of Harvard.
She wrote essays, short stories and poems which were published in The Crisis, Opportunity, The New Negro, Caroling Dusk, and Negro Poets and Their Poems. Some of her more famous poems include, The Eyes of My Regret, At April, and Trees.