Prize-Winning Poet to Visit Holy Cross

WORCESTER, Mass. – Poet and translator Marilyn Nelson will give a reading and presentation on Wednesday, March 11 at 7:30 p.m. in the Rehm Library at the College of the Holy Cross. The event, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by Montserrat— the College's new living-learning program for first-year students.

Nelson has authored or translated 12 books and three chapbooks. Her works include The Homeplace (1990), which won the 1992 Annisfield-Wolf award and was a finalist for the 1991 National Book Award; The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems (1997), which won the 1998 Poet’s Prize and was a finalist for the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the 1997 National Book Award, and the PEN Winship Award; and A Wreath For Emmett Till (2005), which won the 2005 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award and was a 2006 Coretta Scott King Honor Book, a 2006 Michael L. Printz Honor Book, and a 2006 Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award Honor Book.

After earning her B.A. from the University of California, Davis, Nelson went on to obtain post-graduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania (M.A.) and the University of Minnesota (Ph.D.). Nelson has received two NEA creative writing fellowships from the National Endowments for the Arts, two Pushcart Prizes, an A.C.L.S. Contemplative Practices Fellowship, a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, the 1990 Connecticut Arts Award, and a fellowship from the J.S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She served as Poet Laureate of Connecticut from 2001-2006. Nelson also is the founder and director of Soul Mountain Retreat, a small writers’ colony, and she serves as a professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut in Storrs.