December 27, 1862 [Providence, Rhode Island]–April 3, 1937 [Manhattan, New York]
Channing was born in Providence, Rhode Island, to William Francis Channing, an inventor who had worked with Alexander Graham Bell in developing the telephone, and Mary Jane (née Tarr). She was a great-great-granddaughter of William Ellery (1727–1820), a signer of the United States Declaration of Independence. She moved to Southern California in the late 1880s to cure her lung troubles and became an associate editor of The Land of Sunshine. Channing eventually married the artist Charles Walter Stetson after he and Channing’s friend, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, divorced in 1894. In addition to her only book of poetry, Sea Drift, published in Boston in 1899, she published several works of fiction including “’The Sister of a Saint,’ Other Stories” (1895) and the novel The Fortune of a Day (1900).
