Marilyn Nelson – författare

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. Deftly written and brimming with photographs of Savage's stunning sculpture, this is an important portrait of an exceptional artists who, despite the limitations she faced, was compelled to forge a life through art and creativity.

Finalist for the 1991 National Book AwardIn The Homeplace, the stories of a family become the history of a people as Marilyn Nelson Waniek sketches the lives descended from her great-great-grandmother Diverne.The poet's mother, Johnnie Mitchell Nelson, inspired this volume when she bequeathed to Waniek from her deathbed the tales that had shaped her life. The first section of the book presents those stories transformed into graceful, humorous, and deeply touching poems.In the book's second section Waniek honors her late father, Melvin Nelson, and tells the story of his ""family"": the fabled group of black World War II aviators known as the Tuskegee Airmen. Using the language and perspective of her father and his comrades, Waniek explores through a few of their individual stories the hardships and achievements of the thousand black flyers trained at Tuskegee Institute.Throughout The Homeplace, the reader is involved in a series of sharply portrayed lives. By telling a continuous story in a mix of free verse and traditional forms, Waniek gives her work pace and intensity. She handles the villanelle, the sonnet, and the popular ballad with equal skill and gusto. ""I just knew we were going to live some history,"" Johnnie Nelson said at the end of her life. Her daughter has produced an eloquent homage to that history, celebrating the survival of Afro-American pride.

In The Fields of Praise, Marilyn Nelson claims as subjects the life of the spirit, the vicissitudes of love, and the African American experience and arranges them as white pebbles marking our common journey toward a ""monstrous love / that wants to make the world right.""Nelson is a poet of stunning power, able to bring alive the most rarified and subtle of experiences. A slave destined to become a minister preaches sermons of heartrending eloquence and wisdom to a mule. An old woman scrubbing over a washtub receives a personal revelation of what Emancipation means: ""So this is freedom: the peace of hours like these."" Memories of the heroism of the Tuskegee Airmen in the face of aerial combat abroad and virulent racism at home bring a speaker to the sudden awareness of herself as the daughter ""of a thousand proud fathers.""Whether evoking spiritual longing or a return to the wedding at Cana, Nelson renders the interior landscape of all her speakers with absolute precision. This is a beautiful collection indeed, and readers will come away from The Fields of Praise with a reawakened appreciation for life's minor miracles, one of them being the power of the word.

Soaring images, rhythmic language, and wry humor come together in these three narrative poems that explore travel from an African American historical and social perspective. A cab ride turns into an amazing encounter with the driver, an amateur physicist whose ideas about space and time travel spark the poet's musings on chutzpah and artistic ambition. A trip to Triolet, a Creole village in the Indian Ocean island nation of Mauritius, leads the poet to ponder the past and present as she reflects on the ironic complexities of the slave trade and its legacy shared by so many peoples. And in The Cachoeira Tales, longing to take her family on a journey to ""some place sanctified by the Negro soul,"" the poet finds herself in Brazil's Bahia, along with a theater director, a jazz musician, a retired commercial pilot, an activist, a university student, and two mysterious African American women whom they meet along the way. In rhymed couplets, each pilgrim tells a story, and the result is a rollicking, sensual exploration of spirit and community, with a nod to Chaucer and to traditional Trickster tales. Using her remarkable ability to educate and inspire, Marilyn Nelson demonstrates the power of travel to transform our imaginations. We have long known that travel broadens; in these poems, it also deepens and makes wiser.""Joined skin to skin, we moved like molecules // in the great, impossible miracle // of atmosphere, swaying to the music, // all eyes on the stage, all hearts attuning // themselves in beautiful polyrhythmy, // one shaking booty. On one side of me // a young man danced; I felt his muscled warmth // flow into mine, his pure, sexual strength. // On my other sides young women danced, whose curves // bumped me softly, dancing without reserve, // hands waving in the air, releasing scent // fragrant as nard. We danced in reverent, // silent assent to the praise-song of drums.""- from Olodum of The Cachoeira Tales

Conjuring numerous voices and characters across oceans and centuries, Faster Than Light explores widely disparate experiences through the lens of traditional poetic forms. This volume contains a selection of Marilyn Nelson's new and uncollected poems as well as work from each of her lyric histories of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century African American individuals and communities.Poems include the stories of historical figures like Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old boy lynched in 1955, and the inhabitants of Seneca Village, an African American community razed in 1857 for the creation of Central Park. ""Bivouac in a Storm"" tells the story of a group of young soldiers, later known as the Tuskegee Airmen, as they trained near Biloxi, Mississippi, ""marching in summer heat / thick as blackstrap molasses, under trees / haunted by whippings."" Later pieces range from the poet's travels in Africa, Europe, and Polynesia, to poems written in collaboration with Father Jacques de Foiard Brown, a former Benedictine monk and the subject of Nelson's playful fictional fantasy sequence, ""Adventure-Monk!"" Both personal and historical, these poems remain grounded in everyday details but reach toward spiritual and moral truths.

Powerful, beautiful, and often deceptively simple, the poetry of Marilyn Nelson takes a polyphonic approach to rendering American lives of the past, present, and beyond. Voices speak from varied times and places, while the sound that results is that of a full-throated choir telling often-forgotten truths about human existence. Collecting poems written since 2008, The Boley Rodeo features seven sections that capture the range of Nelson's artistry, from historical ruminations on grace and endurance to celebrations of artistic vocation and spirited flights of imagination: Sketches describing the annual Boley Rodeo, the nation's oldest all-Black rodeo, held in her mother's hometown. Excavations of the history of a Congregational church in Old Lyme, Connecticut, some of whose parishioners were slaveholders. Speculative fictions in which a young girl communes with the ghost of an enslaved person from the eighteenth century. Autobiographical pieces evoking a childhood spent moving between air force bases and searching for purpose and certainty while discovering a love of literature. Persona poems speaking in the voices of women artists from throughout history, followed by a sequence on the life and achievements of the Harlem Renaissance sculptor Augusta Savage. And, finally, tales of adventure and intrigue starring the monk Abba Jacob, a familiar figure from Nelson's earlier books, based loosely on a real-life friend and hermit, now recast as the hero of an international mystery thriller. With The Boley Rodeo, Nelson provides further proof of the deep humanism, historical acumen, laugh-out-loud humor, and honest directness that have characterized her writing over the past five decades. It is a work of great emotion and consummate craft.

Powerful, beautiful, and often deceptively simple, the poetry of Marilyn Nelson takes a polyphonic approach to rendering American lives of the past, present, and beyond. Voices speak from varied times and places, while the sound that results is that of a full-throated choir telling often-forgotten truths about human existence. Collecting poems written since 2008, The Boley Rodeo features seven sections that capture the range of Nelson's artistry, from historical ruminations on grace and endurance to celebrations of artistic vocation and spirited flights of imagination: Sketches describing the annual Boley Rodeo, the nation's oldest all-Black rodeo, held in her mother's hometown. Excavations of the history of a Congregational church in Old Lyme, Connecticut, some of whose parishioners were slaveholders. Speculative fictions in which a young girl communes with the ghost of an enslaved person from the eighteenth century. Autobiographical pieces evoking a childhood spent moving between air force bases and searching for purpose and certainty while discovering a love of literature. Persona poems speaking in the voices of women artists from throughout history, followed by a sequence on the life and achievements of the Harlem Renaissance sculptor Augusta Savage. And, finally, tales of adventure and intrigue starring the monk Abba Jacob, a familiar figure from Nelson's earlier books, based loosely on a real-life friend and hermit, now recast as the hero of an international mystery thriller. With The Boley Rodeo, Nelson provides further proof of the deep humanism, historical acumen, laugh-out-loud humor, and honest directness that have characterized her writing over the past five decades. It is a work of great emotion and consummate craft.