Poet Marilyn Nelson Reading for the Haines Memorial Lecture
Thursday, September 14, 2017
The English Department is pleased to announce that the Stacy Allen Haines Memorial Lecture this year will be a reading by poet Marilyn Nelson.
The reading will take place on Thursday, September 21, at 4:30 p.m. in Gailor Auditorium. Both the reading and the book signing to follow are free and open to the public.
Nelson, who taught at Sewanee in the spring of 2011 and received an honorary degree in 2014, is the author of “Faster Than Light” (LSU Press), which won the Milton Kessler Poetry Award. “The Homeplace” (LSU Press) was a finalist for the National Book Award. “The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems” (LSU Press) won the Poets’ Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN Winship Award, and the Lenore Marshall Prize. “The Cachoiera Tales and Other Poems” (LSU Press) won the L.E. Phillabaum Poetry Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award.
Her young adult books include “Carver: A Life in Poems” (Front Street), which received the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award and the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, was a National Book Award finalist, and was designated both a Newbery Honor Book and a Coretta Scott King Honor Book. Another of her young adult books, “A Wreath for Emmett Till” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books for Young Readers), also won the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award and was designated a Coretta Scott King Honor Book, a Michael L. Printz Honor Book, and a Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award Honor Book.
In 2012, Nelson was awarded the Frost Medal. In 2013, she was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. In 2016, her book “My Seneca Village” (namelos) won the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and she received the NSK Neustadt Prize in Children’s Literature.
Her latest books are “American Ace” (Dial) and “The Meeting House” (Antrim House). Most recently she has served on the faculty of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.