How I Discovered Poetry by Marilyn Nelson

On choosing to write 50 poems in sonnet form 'Back when I was in college, people used to talk about the alienation of the artist,' she says, 'not ever quite fitting in any place.' Those experiences had a profound impact on her point of view as an artist. Moving around the country as part of a military family, Nelson was often one of the first black children at her school. 'The story I tell, the family story, is of the family of an African-American flying officer.' So they are now the Tuskeeee Airmen,' she tells All Things Considered host Arun Rath. ' graduated in the last class of cadets from the flight school at Tuskegee. Each of the poems is identified with a place and a date. It's a series of 50 poems about growing up, traveling all over America in the 1950s to follow her father's job in the Air Force. Her latest work, How I Discovered Poetry, is a memoir about her own childhood. Many of her most famous collections are for children. She is a three-time finalist for the National Book Award, winner of the Newbery and Printz and Coretta Scott King awards. Marilyn Nelson is one of America's most celebrated poets. Lubaya’s Quiet Roar, a picture book, is forthcoming from Dial Books.Poetry 'Black Nature': Poems Of Promise And Survival She was Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut from 2001 to 2006 and is currently Poet-in-Residence at Saint John the Divine’s American Poets Corner. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Frost Medal, and the NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children.

Nelson’s honors include two NEA creative writing fellowships, the 1990 Connecticut Arts Award, a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, a fellowship from the J. S.

Her The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems won the 1998 Poets’ Prize Carver: A Life in Poems won the 2001 Boston Globe/Horn Book Award and the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award Fortune’s Bones was a Coretta Scott King Honor Book and won the Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry and My Seneca Village won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Young Adult Literature. Marilyn Nelson is the 2017 NSK Neustadt Laureate and the author or translator of some twenty poetry books, among them a biography-in-verse, Carver: A Life in Poems, a memoir-in-verse, How I Discovered Poetry, and a novel-in-verse, American Ace.

How I Discovered Poetry by Marilyn Nelson