Marilyn Nelson (𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐧 April 26, 1946) is an American poet, translator, biographer, and 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥ren’s book author. She is a professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut, and the former Poet Laureate of Connecticut.

She is a winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, and the Frost Medal. From 1978 to 1994, she published under the name Marilyn Nelson Waniek. She is the author or translator of more than twenty books and five chapbooks of poetry for adults and 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥ren. While most of her work deals with historical subjects, in 2014 she published a memoir, named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2014, entitled How I Discovered Poetry.

Early life

Nelson was 𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐧 on April 26, 1946, in Cleveland, Ohio, to Melvin M. Nelson, a Tuskegee Airman and a U.S. serviceman in the Air Force, and Johnnie Mitchell Nelson, a teacher and pianist. She grew up on military bases and moved all across the United States throughout her 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥hood. She began writing while in elementary school, yet discovered her love for poetry while attending a segregated middle school in Texas. Here, she was introduced to the work of African-American poets.

Nelson earned a B.A. degree from the University of California-Davis, an M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1970, and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1979.

Career

In 1978, Nelson became a professor of English at the University of Connecticut and published her first book, the poetry collection For the Body. From 2001 to 2006, she served as poet laureate of the State of Connecticut. During this time, she also founded the Soul Mountain Retreat. She retired professor emeritus from the University of Connecticut in 2002 yet continued to actively write.

Nelson’s poetry has a dominant family aspect, recovery for African-American history as well as the search for sacred in everyday life.[8] She is also known for incorporating the African-American oral tradition into her work.  Her poetry collections include The Homeplace (Louisiana State University Press), which won the 1992 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award[9] and was a finalist for the 1991 National Book Award; and The Fields Of Praise: New And Selected Poems (Louisiana State University Press), which won the Poets’ Prize in 1999 and was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Award.

Her honors include two NEA creative writing fellowships, the 1990 Connecticut Arts Award, a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, and a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2011, she spent a semester as a Brown Foundation Fellow at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. In 2012, the Poetry Society of America awarded her the Frost Medal.  In 2013, Nelson was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.