Marilyn Nelson (born April 26, 1946) is an American poet, translator, biographer, and children's book author.

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.

[7] In 1978, Nelson became a professor of English at the University of Connecticut and published her first book, the poetry collection For the Body.

Nelson's poetry has a dominant family aspect, recovery for African-American history as well as the search for sacred in everyday life.

[6] 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;[7] and The Fields Of Praise: New And Selected Poems (Louisiana State University Press), which won the Poets' Prize in 1999[9] and was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Award.

[7] In 2011, she spent a semester as a Brown Foundation Fellow at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee.