Author. She is recognized as a Harlem Renaissance writer and poet. She is one of the first African American poets to write especially for children. In 1940 she was the author of one volume of poetry, "Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors" for Second Grade Readers . She was born, Mary Effie Lee, the daughter of well-known educator and religious leader Benjamin F. Lee, Sr. and his wife Mary Elizabeth "Addie" Ashe Lee. Her father was the president of Wilberforce University, a historically Black university in Ohio, from 1876 to 1884 and the editor of the "Christian Recorder" from 1884 to 1892, after which he served as a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church. Her father's ancestry was free persons of color from New Jersey. She was a poet, penning primarily children's poems, being the first African American to gain fame in this regard. Although she never graduated with a degree, her higher education included Wilberforce University, Oberlin College, the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, and the University of Pennsylvania. From 1925 to 1929, she edited a column called "The Little Page" in "The Crisis," the official monthly magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). "The Crisis" had been founded by W.E.B. DuBois in 1910, with she worked with him there since 1917. In 1920 she married Rev. Henry N. Newsome, relocating to Birmingham, Alabama. She became an elementary school teacher and librarian while still contributing to "The Crisis" until 1934. She also founded the Boys of Birmingham Club. After her husband died in 1937, she returned to Ohio. She also contributed mature poetry to "The Poetry of the Negro," which was published in 1949. She worked as the children's librarian at Central State University. Most of her papers were lost when her home in Xenia, Ohio was destroyed by a tornado in 1974.