Marilyn Nelson

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.