27: Marilyn Nelson

What a prolific career! I hope this list encourages you to pick up 2-3 of Marilyn Nelson’s book at you library or bookstore. 

Marilyn Nelson was born in Cleveland to Melvin M. Nelson, a U.S. serviceman in the Air Force and a member of the last class to graduate from air cadet training at Tuskegee Institute. Nelson’s mother, Johnnie Mitchell Nelson, was a teacher. Brought up first on one military base and then another, Nelson started writing while still in elementary school. She earned her BA from the University of California, Davis, and holds postgraduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania (MA, 1970) and the University of Minnesota (PhD, 1979).

Nelson’s honors include the 2019 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the 2019 Denise Levertov Award, a Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America, a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and the 1990 Connecticut Arts Award, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. From 2001–2006, she served as the poet laureate of Connecticut. Nelson was also awarded the 2017 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, given in recognition of a “storied literary career exploring history, race relations, and feminism in America.” She writes for children, teens, and adults.

website: https://marilynnelson-poetry.com/

A is for Oboe (Penguin Random House, 2022) co authored with Lera Auerbach.
Two widely acclaimed poets–one a composer and classical pianist as well–have come together to create this extraordinary portrait of the orchestra in all of its richness and fascination, using the structure of the alphabet in a way that’s entirely new and delightful. A is for the first note you hear as you take your seat in the concert hall, played by the headstrong oboe. B is for the bassoon, “the orchestra’s jester, complaining impatiently through his nose.”

Augusta Savage (Christy Ottaviano Books-Little Brown and Hachette, 2021)
Augusta Savage was arguably the most influential American artist of the 1930s. A gifted sculptor, Savage was commissioned to create a portrait bust of W.E.B. Du Bois for the New York Public Library. She flourished during the Harlem Renaissance, and became a teacher to an entire generation of African American artists, including Jacob Lawrence, and would go on to be nationally recognized as one of the featured artists at the 1939 World’s Fair. She was the first-ever recorded Black gallerist. After being denied an artists’ fellowship abroad on the basis of race, Augusta Savage worked to advance equal rights in the arts. And yet popular history has forgotten her name.

Papa’s Freeday Party (Just Us Books, 2021)
Johnnie wants to celebrate her Papa’s birthday, but Papa doesn’t know exactly when that special day is. Johnnie doesn’t understand how that could be. Then she learns about Papa’s childhood–how he built a new life in the all-Black town of Boley, Oklahoma. Inspired by her father’s incredible story, Johnnie decides to throw Papa a different kind of party–one to recognize her Father’s Day of freedom. Based on a true story about the author’s grandfather, Papa’s Free Day Party is a powerful celebration of storytelling, strength, and the importance of family. 

Lubaya’s Quiet Roar (Rocky Pond Books, 2020)
Newbery Honor winner Marilyn Nelson and fine artist Philemona Williamson have come together to create this lyrical, impactful story of how every child, even the quietest, can make a difference in their community and world. Young Lubaya is happiest when she’s drawing, often behind the sofa while her family watches TV. There, she creates pictures on the backs of her parents’ old protest posters. But when upsetting news shouts into their living room, her parents need the posters again. The next day her family takes part in a march, and there, on one side of the posters being held high, are Lubaya’s drawings of kids holding hands and of the sun shining over the globe–rousing visual statements of how the world could be. “Lubaya’s roar may not be loud, but a quiet roar can make history.”

Mrs. Nelson’s Class (World Enough Writers, 2020)
Mrs. Nelson’s Class (World Enough Writers, 2017) On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas that state-sanctioned segregation of public schools is unconstitutional. In September 1954, in an Air Force base school near Salina, Kansas, young African American teacher Mrs. Johnnie Mitchell Nelson became the teacher of a second grade class of twenty white children. Mrs. Nelson knew, but did her pupils understand they were making history together? 

Through a class roster of persona poems by poets Doug Anderson, Martha Collins, Alfred Corn, Annie Finch, Helen Frost, Margaret Gibson, Jeanine Hathaway, Andrew Hudgins, Mark Jarman, Peter Johnson, Meg Kearney, Ron Koertge, David Mason, Leslie Monsour, Dinty W. Moore, Marilyn Nelson, Lesléa Newman, Michael Palma, Michael Waters, and Katherine Williams, this anthology presents Mrs. Nelson and her class, imagining how she and her students may have experienced their unique situation.

American Ace (Rocky Pond Books, 2016)  
Connor’s grandmother leaves his dad a letter when she dies, and the letter’s confession shakes their tight-knit Italian-American family: The man who raised Dad is not his birth father.

But the only clues to this birth father’s identity are a class ring and a pair of pilot’s wings. And so Connor takes it upon himself to investigate—a pursuit that becomes even more pressing when Dad is hospitalized after a stroke. What Connor discovers will lead him and his father to a new, richer understanding of race, identity, and each other.

My Seneca Village (Namelos, 2015)
Quiet for more than 135 years, the voices of Seneca Village are rising again. Angela Riddles ponders being free-but-not-free. The orphaned Donnelly brothers get gold fever. A conjurer sees past his era and into ours.Drawing upon history and her exquisite imagination, Newbery Honor medalist, two-time Coretta Scott King Honor medalist, and National Book Award nomineee Marilyn Nelson recreates the long lost community of Seneca Village. A multi-racial, multi-ethnic neighborhood in the center of Manhattan, it thrived in the middle years of the 19th century. Families prayed in its churches, children learned in its school, babies were born, and loved ones were laid to rest. Then work crews arrived to build Central Park, and Seneca Village disappeared.Illustrated in the poet’s own words — with brief prose descriptions of what she sees inside her poems — this collection takes readers back in time and deep into the mind’s eye of one of America’s most gifted writers. Included as well is a foreword that outlines the history of Seneca Village and a guide to the variety of poetic forms she employs throughout this exceptional book.

How I Discovered Poetry (Rocky Pond Books, 2014)
Looking back on her childhood in the 1950s, Newbery Honor winner and National Book Award finalist Marilyn Nelson tells the story of her development as an artist and young woman through fifty eye-opening poems. Readers are given an intimate portrait of her growing self-awareness and artistic inspiration along with a larger view of the world around her: racial tensions, the Cold War era, and the first stirrings of the feminist movement.

Snook Alone (Candlewick, 2010)
Abba Jacob is a monk who lives on a far, far away island with his loyal rat terrier, Snook. Every day, from the wee hours of dawn till the sun sets over the sea, Snook keeps Abba Jacob company as he prays or works, tending the gardens or fixing the plumbing of the little hermitage he calls home. But when the two are separated by a ferocious storm, Snook must learn to fend for himself in the wild, all alone in a world of fierceness and wonder. Will he ever again hear the loving voice that he waits for? Simply and lyrically told by award-winning poet Marilyn Nelson and beautifully illustrated by Timothy Basil Ering with wit, warmth, and affection for the natural world, this captivating tale of friendship lost and found conveys the power of faith against all odds.

Sweethearts of Rhythm: The Story of the Greatest All-Girl Swing Band in the World (Dial Books, 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. 

Beautiful Ballerina (Scholastic, 2009)
Every little girl has the dream to become a prima ballerina! On today’s ever-changing cultural stage, ballerinas come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and abilities. To celebrate the beauty of black ballerinas, here is a lush photographic picture book with a brilliant poetic narrative, brought to young readers by two amazing talents. The minimal text balances the harmony of the photos and demonstrates the joy of movement.

The Freedom Business (Wordsong, 2008)
The true narrative of a slave from Africa, crafted in verse by Marilyn Nelson. Born an African prince, Broteer Furro was captured by slave traders at age six. As he stepped onto a cargo ship, the vessel’s steward purchased the boy and gave him a new name: Venture. He landed in Rhode Island and worked through a lifetime of slavery to buy not only his own freedom but the freedom of his wife and children. Remarkable in his own time for his ambition and physical stature, Venture Smith became history’s first man to document both his capture from Africa and life as an American slave. In this breathtaking volume, Marilyn Nelson’s poems sit opposite the text of Smith’s own narrative. Nelson’s controlled verse layers this edition with insight into Smith’s stoic eighteenth-century prose. Deborah Dancy’s stark watercolor collages highlight the tension between the economical language of the narrative and the turbulent emotion within the poems.

Pemba’s Song A Ghost Story (Scholastic, 2008) co authored with Tonya C. Hegamin.
Pemba knows she’s not crazy. But who is that looking out at her through her mirror’s eye? And why does the apparition call her “friend?” Her real friends are back home in Brooklyn, not in the old colonial house in Colchester, Connecticut, where none of this would have happened if Daddy were still alive. But now all Pemba has is Mom and that strange old man, Abraham. Maybe he’s the crazy one.

Thank goodness for Pemba’s Playlist and the journal she keeps. There are so many answers deep inside that music. And so much is revealed in Pemba’s poetry — the hops she writes and those coming through her iPod. Phyllys, an eighteenth-century slave girl, has answers, too. They billow out from her ghostly visits to Pemba, visits that transform both girls in ways neither expected.

A Wreath for Emmett Till (2005)
In 1955, people all over the United States knew that Emmett Louis Till was a fourteen-year-old African American boy lynched for supposedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. The brutality of his murder, the open-casket funeral, and the acquittal of the men tried for the crime drew wide media attention.

Fortune’s Bones The Manumission Requiem (Wordsong. 2004)
For over 200 years, the Mattatuck Museum in Connecticut has housed a mysterious skeleton. In 1996, community members decided to find out what they could about it. Historians discovered that the bones were those of an enslaved man named Fortune, who was owned by a local doctor. After Fortune’s death, the doctor rendered the bones.

Further research revealed that Fortune had married, had fathered four children, and had been baptized later in life. His bones suggest that after a life of arduous labor, he died in 1798 at about the age of 60. The Manumission Requiem is Marilyn Nelson’s poetic commemoration of Fortune’s life. Detailed notes and archival photographs enhance the reader’s appreciation of the poem.

Carver: A Life in Poems (Wordsong, 2001)
George Washington Carver was determined to help the people he loved. Born a slave in Missouri, he left home in search of an education, eventually earning his master’s degree. When Booker T. Washington invited Carver to start the agricultural department at the all-black-staffed Tuskegee Institute, Carver truly found his calling. He spent the rest of his life seeking solutions to the poverty among landless Black farmers by developing new uses for soil-replenishing crops such as peanuts, cowpeas, and sweet potatoes. This STEAM biography reveals Carver’s complex and profoundly devout life.

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