Marilyn Nelson is the author or translator of twelve books and three chapbooks. Her honors include two NEA creative writing fellowships, the 1990 Connecticut Arts Award, an A.C.L.S. Contemplative Practices Fellowship, a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, a fellowship from the J.S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, three honorary doctorates, and the Commander’s Award for Public Service from the…

The daughter of a Tuskegee Airman and a teacher, Marilyn Nelson was brought up primarily on military bases and started writing while still in elementary school. She earned her BA from the University of California, Davis, and holds postgraduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania (MA, 1970) and the University of Minnesota (PhD, 1979). Her long…

A gathering of painters, composers, theologians, environmentalists, and poets from all over the country has spent the last two days, meeting here around the clock. We have shared our art with one another and considered, in this wild place, the predicament we have in common as citizens of the earth. We know beyond any doubt that we humans have damaged the planet. Polar ice is melting. The earth’s climate zones are suddenly shifting. Weather is veering toward violence. Sea levels are rising.

“Van Gogh did not sell a single painting during his lifetime, became increasingly unhinged, and shot himself at the age of thirty-seven.” So writes poet Jeanne Murray Walker in her engaging essay in the current issue of Image (#98), “Sandals on the Ground: My Pilgrimage with the Sonnet.” Walker’s sentence about Van Gogh reminds me…

This post isn’t just for knitters. It’s for anyone who reads poetry—or prose. I’d love your help in sleuthing for knitting metaphors: in poetry especially, but wherever they happen to turn up. In my previous post, I mused on knitting as a way of meditating with poetry. Today I want to turn the tables and…

Let’s just take some of the poets in the special issue of Image (#85) on “Evolution and the Imago Dei.” (And since Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Sì came out nearly the same time as Image, I hear the Pope conversing with the poets.)