In 1927–1928, together with Arthur Fauset, she co-edited Black Opals, a literary magazine named after a line from a poem in its first issue.

[1] Born in Savannah, Georgia to parents who were college graduates and professionals, Bright and her family moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the early 1910s during the Great Migration.

[3][4] Shortly after their arrival in Savannah, in 1892 the Brights established the first private kindergarten and primary school for blacks in Georgia.

The industrial city was one of the northern destinations for tens of thousands of black migrants from the rural South, attracted to its jobs and other opportunities in the Great Migration.

Other members of her chapter included Virginia M. Alexander, who later became a physician and founded the Aspiranto Health Home; Anna Roselle Johnson, a social worker, educator, civic activist, and wife of the famed chemist Percy Lavon Julian; and Sadie Tanner Mossell, the first woman to receive a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

"[5] Bright and Mae V. Cowdery, another poet from Philadelphia, both had poems published in the first issue; they were praised by Countee Cullen, the new literary editor of Opportunity, a journal in New York.

A landscape painter and writer ... Miss Bright saw to it that the Hill School was immaculate and vibrantly decorated with pictures and posters.

Blackboards and walls were crowded with posters of Harriet Tubman, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Frederick Douglass, Alexander Dumas, and the great black Russian writer Pushkin.

During her career, Bright also served on more than fifteen civic boards or organizations directed toward improving schools and neighborhoods; she was concerned about the whole life of her students and their world.

She worked to gain improvements in city health services, and to facilitate "cooperation among diverse members of society.

"[3] After her retirement, Bright taught in-service courses to teachers on Black history until 1959, under direction of the Board of Education.

In 1972, Bright co-authored America: Red, White, Black, Yellow with her longtime collaborator Arthur Fauset.