Fauset, Jessie R(edmon) (1882–1961)

US writer. As literary editor of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's magazine Crisis (1919–26), she was influential in promoting black Francophone and Harlem Renaissance writers. She also wrote four novels featuring strong black heroines.

She was born in Fredericksville, New Jersey, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell University and studied at the Sorbonne, Paris. After a long career as a high school teacher in Washington, DC, and New York, she joined the faculty of the Hampton Institute (1949), becoming one of the first black American women to receive recognition as an intellectual.