Marilyn Nelson

Augusta Savage: The Shape of a Sculptor's Life

Biography, 2022

A powerful biography in poems​ about a trailblazing artist and a pillar of the Harlem Renaissance—with an afterword by the curator of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

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.

American Ace

Young Adult, 2016

This riveting novel in verse, perfect for fans of Jacqueline Woodson and Toni Morrison, explores American history and race through the eyes of a teenage boy embracing his newfound identity.

When will the Constitution’s racial fractions become a healthy whole? Multiaward-winning poet Nelson attempts to answer this still-vexing question. Sixteen-year-old Connor Bianchini casually believes in his family- and religion-confirmed half-Irish, half-Italian identity. Connor’s father, Tony, finds out differently when his mother, Lucia, dies and leaves him with the inheritance of pilot’s wings, a gold class ring, and a letter, in which Lucia states that Tony is the “fruit of great love” between her and an airman nicknamed Ace. Research leads Connor and his father to the discovery that Ace’s class ring came from Wilberforce University, a historically black university, and his wings may have come from his service as one of the legendary Tuskegee Airmen. Whereas Connor embraces his “new” black ancestor, though, Tony and his other son (Connor’s half brother), Carlo, react negatively: Carlo tells his father that “bad news should be told privately,” and Tony literally has a stroke. The author’s meticulous verse is the perfect vehicle to convey the devastating fragility of racial and familial identity in an America where interracial love is still divided through the problem of the color line. Readers will join Nelson’s protagonist in quietly hoping for that healing, too.

The Meeting House

Poetry, 2016

“Artfully crafted, an engrossing and important collection of memories and moments from a pivotal time in American history.” – Kirkus

In The Meeting House, Marilyn Nelson has focused not only on the history of the First Congregational Church in Old Lyme, Connecticut, but also on slavery and bigotry in a presumably enlightened part of the Union. Her dismay is leavened by generosity of spirit, the same qualities revealed in her earlier books.

Mrs Nelson's Class

Poetry, 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-sanction segregation of public schools is unconstitutional. In September 1954, in an airfare 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, Jeannine Hathaway, Andrew Hudgins, Mark Jarman, Peter Johnson, Meg Kearney, Ron Koertge, David Mason, Leslie Monsour, Dinty W. Moore, Marilyn Nelson, LeslEa Newman, Michael Palma, Michael Waters, Katherine Williams, this anthology presents Mrs Nelson and her class, imagining how she and her students may have experienced their unique situation.

My Seneca Village

Poetry, 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, 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

 Memoir, 2014

A powerful and thought-provoking Civil Rights era memoir from one of America’s most celebrated poets. 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. A first-person account of African-American history, this is a book to study, discuss, and treasure.

Faster Than Light: New and Selected Poems, 1996-2011

Poetry, 2013

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.  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. Both personal and historical, these poems remain grounded in everyday details but reach toward spiritual and moral truths.

Sweethearts of Rhythm

 Young Adult, 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. Illustrations by Jerry Pinkney.

The Freedom Business

Young Adult, 2008

Born a prince in Africa, Venture Smith would become known to history as the first man to document both his capture from Africa and life as an American slave. Nelson’s controlled verse layers this edition with insight into Smith’s stoic eighteenth-century prose. “In an extraordinary slave narrative recorded in 1798, Venture Smith remembers his capture in Guinea as a child…Smith’s original, first-person account, published in 1798, appears opposite from Nelson’s stirring poems, which are written in Venture’s voice and both intensify and comment on Smith’s experiences. …Dancy’s blurry sepia background art…includes ink lines that evoke chains and ropes and then broken bonds. It’s surprising that this essential part of American biography and history isn’t more widely known. Suggest this as a crossover title to adults.” —Booklist

Snook Alone

 Children’s Book, 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. A faithful little dog must survive on his own in the wild in this evocative tale of loss and reunion from acclaimed poet Marilyn Nelson and the inimitable Timothy Basil Ering.