Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882–1961) was a writer and editor. Born in Camden County, New Jersey, she was the first African-American graduate from the Philadelphia High School for Girls. Fauset later studied classical languages at Cornell University and French at the University of Pennsylvania. After graduating, she worked as a teacher but continued studies at the Sorbonne in Paris during the summer. Fauset became the literary editor of the Crisis, an integral publication of the Harlem Renaissance. In this role, she mentored the careers of many prominent African-American modernist writers, such as Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Count Cullen, and Claude McKay. While at the Crisis, she herself wrote fiction with themes of racial discrimination, passing, and feminism through the characters of black working professionals. She emphasized a realistic representation of her community, exploring binaries such as female/male and black/white, and engaged with concerns about patronage, sexuality and the meaning of home. As a member of the NAACP, she represented the organization in the Pan-African Congress in 1921. Fauset published accounts of her extensive travels, most notably five essays from a trip with painter Laura Wheeler Waring. From 1920-1921 Fauset also edited a monthly magazine for African-American children called Brownies’ Book.

During the 1920s, Fauset and her sister made the apartment they shared in Harlem a salon where the black intelligentsia and their allies gathered to discuss art and politics. Although Fauset probably would not have used the term “salon” to describe her parties, she hosted the events dedicated to literature and poetry and became well known in the community’s art scene. They were private and invitation only gatherings of African Americans in which no curious white gaze was allowed. Fauset collapsed the notions of public and private, domestic and communal, and practical and creative. Many considered Fauset a revolutionary, who fostered a provocative atmosphere in her salons, in which her and her guests could explore ideas surrounding race and gender.