She achieved prominence as a poet, author of short stories and dramas, newspaper columnist, women's rights activist, and editor of two anthologies.

Alice Ruth Moore was born in New Orleans on July 19, 1875, the daughter of a formerly enslaved African American seamstress and a white seaman.

[1] Her parents, Patricia Wright and Joseph Moore, were middle-class and part of the city's multiracial Creole community.

[2] In 1895, Alice Dunbar Nelson's first collection of short stories and poems, Violets and Other Tales,[3] was published by The Monthly Review.

Although her later race-focused writings would dispute this fact, Alice's opinion on the race problem contradicted Paul Laurence's.

In a letter from March 6, 1896, Paul may have attempted to instigate jealousy in Alice by talking about a woman he had met in Paris.

In 1898, after corresponding for a few years, Alice moved to Washington, D.C. to join Paul Laurence Dunbar and they secretly eloped in 1898.

Their marriage proved stormy, exacerbated by Dunbar's declining health due to tuberculosis, alcoholism developed from doctor-prescribed whiskey consumption, and depression.

[9] In 1910, she married Henry A. Callis, a prominent physician and professor at Howard University, but this marriage ended in divorce.

She worked with him to publish the play Masterpieces of Negro Experience (1914), which was only shown once at Howard High School in Wilmington.

During this time she also had intimate relationships with women, including Howard High School principal Edwina Kruse[2] and the activist Fay Jackson Robinson.

[11] In 1930, Nelson traveled throughout the country lecturing, covering thousands of miles and presenting at thirty-seven educational institutions.

While she continued to write stories and poetry, she became more politically active in Wilmington, and put more effort into journalism on leading topics.

In her 1918 poem "I Sit and Sew," Nelson writes from the perspective of a woman who feels suppressed from engaging directly with the war effort.

These works display Nelson's belief that racial equality could be achieved through military service and sacrificing one's self to their nation.

During the late 19th century, it was unusual for women to work outside of the home, let alone an African American woman, and journalism was a hostile, male-dominated field.

[14][15] In 1920, Nelson was removed from teaching at Howard High School for attending Social Justice Day on October 1 against the will of Principal Ray Wooten.

Her diary addressed issues such as family, friendship, sexuality, health, professional problems, travels, and often financial difficulties.

She believed that African Americans should have equal access to education, jobs, healthcare, transportation and other constitutionally granted rights.

[20] Her activism and support for certain racial and feminist causes started to appear around the early 1900s, where she publicly discussed the women's suffrage movement in the middle American states.

In 1918, she was a field representative for the Woman's Committee of the Council of Defense, only a few years after marrying Robert J. Nelson who was a poet and a social activist as well.

She successfully created a career co-editing newspapers and essays that focused on the social issues that minorities and women were struggling through in American through the 1920s, and she was specifically influential due to her gain of an international supportive audience that she used to voice over her opinion.

In an autobiographical piece, "Brass Ankles Speaks", she discusses the difficulties she faced growing up mixed-race in Louisiana.

In stanza one, the speaker addresses the endless task of sitting and sewing as opposed to engaging in activity that aids soldiers at war.