Marilyn Nelson is the Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut and a three-time National Book Award Finalist. She has won the Annisfield-Wolf Award and the 1999 Poets' Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Winship Award and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Dr. Nelson lives in Storrs, Connecticut.

 

A Wreath for Emmett Till
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Globe-Horn Book Honors Awards

ISBN: 0618397523
Format: Hardcover, 48pp
Pub. Date: April 2005
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company
Age Range: 12

"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 held by his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, and the aquittal of the men tried for the crime drew wide media attention." In a profound and chilling poem, award winning poet Marilyn Nelson reminds us of the boy whose fate helped spark the civil rights movement. This martyr's wreath, woven from a little-known but sophisticated form of poetry, challenges us to speak out against modern-day injustices, to "speak what we see."
 

 

Carver: A Life in Poems
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2002 Coretta Scott King Honor Books

ISBN: 1886910537
Format: Hardcover, 112pp
Pub. Date: March 2001
Publisher: Boyds Mills Press
Edition Description: 1 ED
Age Range: Young Adult

This collection of poems assembled by award-winning writer Marilyn Nelson provides young readers with a compelling, lyrical account of the life of revered African-American botanist and inventor George Washington Carver. Born in 1864 and raised by white slave owners, Carver left home in search of an education and eventually earned a master's degree in agriculture. In 1896, he was invited by Booker T. Washington to head the agricultural department at the all-black-staffed Tuskegee Institute. There he conducted innovative research to find uses for crops such as cowpeas, sweet potatoes, and peanuts, while seeking solutions to the plight of landless black farmers. Through 44 poems, told from the point of view of Carver and the people who knew him, Nelson celebrates his character and accomplishments. She includes prose summaries of events and archival photographs.
 

 

Fortune's Bones: The Manumission Requiem
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2005 Coretta Scott King Author Honor Book

ISBN: 1932425128
Format: Hardcover, 32pp
Pub. Date: October 2004
Publisher: Boyds Mills Press
Age Range: Young Adult

There is a skeleton on display in the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, Connecticut. It has been in the town for over 200 years. Over time, the bones became the subject of stories and speculation in Waterbury. In 1996 a group of community-based volunteers, working in collaboration with the museum staff, discovered that the bones were those of a slave named Fortune who had been owned by a local doctor. After Fortune's death, the doctor dissected the body, rendered the bones, and assembled the skeleton. A great deal is still not known about Fortune, but it is known that he was baptized, was married, and had four children. He died at about the age of 60, sometime after 1797.Marilyn Nelson was commissioned by the Mattatuck Museum and received a grant from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts to write a poem in commemoration of Fortune's life. The Manumission Requiem is that poem. Detailed notes and archival materials provide contextual information to enhance the reader's appreciation of the poem.