Marilyn Nelson
Award-winning Poet
“Nelson's writing is rich in story, philosophy/theology, and language. She moves comfortably from low to high diction and back again. She can write within the strict parameters of the sonnet form; she can write in slant rhyme or in free verse, and knows intuitively which form her subject requires. In all the poems, whatever their form, Nelson's guiding voice and intellect provide the compelling force. She is moral, loving, visionary, strong in soul. Reading her work is as much a lesson in history and in human nature as it is a lesson in poetry.” —Joyce S. Brown
“Nelson’s bold and sure poems long for heaven and—happily for us—continue a lifelong affair with the occasions of earth.” —Mark Doty
“Her words teach us how to praise ourselves by praising each other.”
—Yusef Komunyakaa
Poet Marilyn Nelson is the author or translator of twelve books and three chapbooks. Her book The Homeplace won the 1992 Annisfield-Wolf Award and was a finalist for the 1991 National Book Award. The Fields Of Praise: New And Selected Poems won the 1998 Poets' Prize and was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Award, the PEN Winship Award, and the Lenore Marshall Prize. Carver: A Life In Poems won the 2001 Boston Globe/Hornbook Award and the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award, was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award, a Newbery Honor Book, and a Coretta Scott King Honor Book. Fortune’s Bones was a Coretta Scott King Honor Book and won the Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry. A Wreath For Emmett Till won the 2005 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award and was a 2006 Coretta Scott King Honor Book, a 2006 Michael L. Printz Honor Book, and a 2006 Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award Honor Book. The Cachoiera Tales And Other Poems won the L.E. Phillabaum Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Nelson's newest book of poetry, Sweethearts of Rhythm, was released in 2009 from Dial, and was illustrated by Jerry Pinkney.
Her honors include two NEA creative writing fellowships, the 1990 Connecticut Arts Award, an A.C.L.S. Contemplative Practices Fellowship, a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, and a fellowship from the J.S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Nelson is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Connecticut; founder and director of Soul Mountain Retreat, a small writers’ colony; and was Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut from 2001-2006.
About SWEETHEARTS OF RHYTHM (2009)In the 1940s, as the world was at war, a remarkable jazz band performed on the American home front. This all-female band, originating from a boarding school in the heart of Mississippi, found its way to the most famous ballrooms in the country, offering solace during the hard years of the war. They dared to be an interracial group despite the cruelties of Jim Crow laws, and they dared to assert their talents though they were women in a “man’s” profession. Told in thought-provoking poems and arresting images, this unusual look at our nation’s history is deep and inspiring. Illustrations by Jerry Pinkney.
About THE FREEDOM BUSINESS (2008)
Born a prince in Africa, Venture Smith would become known to history as the first man to document both his capture from Africa and life as an American slave. Nelson’s controlled verse layers this edition with insight into Smith's stoic eighteenth-century prose. “In an extraordinary slave narrative recorded in 1798, Venture Smith remembers his capture in Guinea as a child...Smith’s original, first-person account, published in 1798, appears opposite from Nelson’s stirring poems, which are written in Venture’s voice and both intensify and comment on Smith’s experiences. ...Dancy’s blurry sepia background art...includes ink lines that evoke chains and ropes and then broken bonds. It’s surprising that this essential part of American biography and history isn’t more widely known. Suggest this as a crossover title to adults.” —Booklist
