Marilyn Nelson

Harman Writer-In-Residence, Spring 2017 

(Photo by Curt Richter)

Marilyn Nelson is the author or translator of seventeen poetry books and the memoir How I Discovered Poetry. She is also the author of The Fields Of Praise: New And Selected Poems, which won the 1998 Poets’ Prize, Carver: A Life In Poems, which won the 2001 Boston Globe/Hornbook Award and the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award, and Fortune’s Bones, which was a Coretta Scott King Honor Book and won the Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry. Nelson’s honors include two NEA creative writing fellowships, the 1990 Connecticut Arts Award, a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, a fellowship from the J.S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Frost Medal. She was the Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut from 2001-2006.

From Crows (2016)

What if to taste and see, to notice things,
to stand each is up against emptiness
for a moment or an eternity—
images collected in consciousness
like a tree alone on the horizon—
is the main reason we’re on the planet.
The food’s here of the first crow to arrive,
numbers two and three at a safe distance,
then approaching the hand-created taste
of leftover coconut macaroons.
The instant sparks in the earth’s awareness

Tuesday, March 21, 2017, 5:45 pm

A reading and conversation with Marilyn Nelson in the Asriel and Marie Rackow Conference Room, Room 750, Information and Technology Building, Baruch College. Photos by Glenda Hydler. Check out some photos and a reacording of the event below.

Marilyn Nelson (left) with Harman Director Bridgett Davis.

Marilyn Nelson with Journalism students.

Students waiting for Marilyn’s reading to begin.