Department of English to host reading by poet Marilyn Nelson

1:47 p.m., Sept. 8, 2011--The poet Marilyn Nelson will be featured in a reading at 7 p.m., Tuesday, Sept. 27, in 104 Gore Hall on the University of Delaware campus in Newark.

The presentation is part of the Department of English speaker series and is being partially funded by the Committee on Cultural Activities and Public Events (CAPE) and the Department of Black Amerian Studies at the University.

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June 6-9: Food and culture series

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• June 6-9: Food and culture series
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• Through Sept. 16: Women of color in academia

Nelson is the author or translator of 14 books and five 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. The poems in this collection embrace numerous themes, including the changing nature of love, racism, motherhood, marriage, and domesticity. 

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. 

Her young adult book, 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.

Image Journal writes, "American history as conceived by Marilyn Nelson is the inside-out, last-shall-be-first version. She inhabits the voices of the overlooked and disenfranchised and shines light into forgotten corners that reveal essential truths about the whole."

Nelson's honors include two National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowships, the 1990 Connecticut Arts Award, an American Council of Learned Societies Contemplative Practices Fellowship, the Department of the Army Commander's Award for Public Service, a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, and a fellowship from the J.S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. 

Nelson is a professor emerita of English at the University of Connecticut; was founder/director and host of Soul Mountain Retreat, a small non-profit writers' colony; and held the office of Poet Laureate of the state of Connecticut from 2001-2006.

Photo by Derek Dudek