New Releases by Marilyn Nelson

Before World War II, leaders of the Army Air Corps (predecessor to the modern-day Air Force) barred African Americans from serving in uniform. Facing mounting public pressure in the years before the war, the U.S. government ordered the removal of some restrictions against Black aviators, first by opening civilian training programs in 1939, and then by accepting Black pilots into racially segregated units of the Army Air Corps in 1941. A new air base at Tuskegee, Alabama, became the center for the training program of Black air personnel. First with the 99th Fighter Squadron and later with the 332nd Fighter Group, African Americans contributed to the war effort, serving in the Mediterranean combat theater, flying from bases in North Africa and Italy while supporting operations against German forces. Later, the USAAF created the 477th Bombardment Group of African American B-25 Mitchell crews, which did not see combat. These were the Tuskegee Airmen.

This powerful biography in poemsu200b tells the life of Augusta Savage, the trailblazing artist and pillar of the Harlem Renaissance. A Claudia Lewis Award Winner for Poetry by the Bank Street College of Education A Black Caucus ALA Children & Young Adult Award Winner A CCBC Children’s Choice • A CBC Teacher Favorite 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 artist who, despite the limitations she faced, was compelled to forge a life through art and creativity. Features an afterword by the curator of the Art & Artifacts Division of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Horn Book • Kirkus Reviews • School Library Journal • Bank Street College ★ "A stunning portrait of artistic genius and Black history in America." —Booklist, starred review ★ "A wonderful addition to young people’s literature on African American artists." —Horn Book, starred review ★ "In a rich biography in verse, Nelson (A is for Oboe) gives voice to the Black sculptor Augusta Savage (1892-1962), a key Harlem Renaissance figure." —Publishers Weekly, starred review ★ "Nelson’s arresting poetry, which is accompanied by photographs of Savage’s work, dazzles as it experiments with form. … A lyrical biography from a master of the craft." —Kirkus Reviews, starred review ★ "A master poet breathes life and color into this portrait of a u00adhistorically significant sculptor and her remarkable story." —School Library Journal, starred review

This deeply imaginative and entertaining poetry collection details the pleasures of the orchestra, from strong-willed A to satisfied Z. Two widely acclaimed poets--one a composer and classical pianist as well--have come together to create this extraordinary portrait of the orchestra in all of its richness and fascination, using the structure of the alphabet in a way that''s entirely new and delightful. A is for the first note you hear as you take your seat in the concert hall, played by the headstrong oboe. B is for the bassoon, "the orchestra''s jester, complaining impatiently through his nose." And C is for the conductor, "like the captain on the bridge of a great ship, navigating the composer''s musical charts." Onward the text goes, soaring in reverie and making thought-provoking observations while not taking itself too seriously--illuminating all the various details that flow together to create the nourishing experience of playing or listening to music.

In this stirring picture book about social justice activism and the power of introverts, a quiet girl''s artwork makes a big impression at a protest rally. Newbery Honor winner Marilyn Nelson and fine artist Philemona Williamson have come together to create this lyrical, impactful story of how every child, even the quietest, can make a difference in their community and world. Young Lubaya is happiest when she''s drawing, often behind the sofa while her family watches TV. There, she creates pictures on the backs of her parents'' old protest posters. But when upsetting news shouts into their living room, her parents need the posters again. The next day her family takes part in a march, and there, on one side of the posters being held high, are Lubaya''s drawings of kids holding hands and of the sun shining over the globe--rousing visual statements of how the world could be. "Lubaya''s roar may not be loud, but a quiet roar can make history."

Abba Jacob, a hermit monk, shares with a group of children about how he learned to meditate from a baobab tree which was his boyhood's "best silence teacher." Observing the baobab and the creatures who lived in its trunk and branches taught him about beauty, friendship, generosity, vulnerability, compassion, and the community of living things: lessons he tells us we can learn ourselves by going inward in meditation. Listening to silence may help us to see the connection between the natural world and faith.

Newbery Honor Book National Book Award finalist Coretta Scott King Author Honor Book Boston Globe–Horn Book Award Flora Stieglitz Straus Award Beautiful verse explores agricultural scientist George Washington Carver''s life and many achievements, from his work as a botanist and inventor to his unsung gifts as a painter, musician, and teacher. George Washington Carver was determined to help the people he loved. Born a slave in Missouri, he left home in search of an education, eventually earning his master''s degree. When Booker T. Washington invited Carver to start the agricultural department at the all-black-staffed Tuskegee Institute, Carver truly found his calling. He spent the rest of his life seeking solutions to the poverty among landless Black farmers by developing new uses for soil-replenishing crops such as peanuts, cowpeas, and sweet potatoes. This STEAM biography reveals Carver''s complex and profoundly devout life.

Winner of the Coretta Scott King Book Award For young readers comes a poetic commemoration of the life of an 18th-century slave, from a past poet laureate and three-time National Book Award finalist For over 200 years, the Mattatuck Museum in Connecticut has housed a mysterious skeleton. In 1996, community members decided to find out what they could about it. Historians discovered that the bones were those of an enslaved man named Fortune, who was owned by a local doctor. After Fortune’s death, the doctor rendered the bones. Further research revealed that Fortune had married, had fathered four children, and had been baptized later in life. His bones suggest that after a life of arduous labor, he died in 1798 at about the age of 60. The Manumission Requiem is Marilyn Nelson’s poetic commemoration of Fortune’s life. Detailed notes and archival photographs enhance the reader’s appreciation of the poem.

Sixteen-year-old Connor tries to help his severely depressed father, who learned upon his mother''s death that Nonno was not his biological father, by doing research that reveals Dad''s father was probably a Tuskegee Airman.

"Poetry illustrated in the poet''s own words--with brief prose descriptions of what she sees inside her work--this ... collection takes readers back in time and deep into the mind''s eye of Marilyn Nelson ... [who] draws upon history, and her ... imagination, to revive the long lost community of Seneca Village"--Jacket.

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.

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. Poems include the stories of historical figures like Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old boy lynched in 1955, and the inhabitants of Seneca Village, an African American community razed in 1857 for the creation of Central Park. "Bivouac in a Storm" tells the story of a group of young soldiers, later known as the Tuskegee Airmen, as they trained near Biloxi, Mississippi, "marching in summer heat / thick as blackstrap molasses, under trees / haunted by whippings." 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 and the subject of Nelson''s playful fictional fantasy sequence, "Adventure-Monk!" Both personal and historical, these poems remain grounded in everyday details but reach toward spiritual and moral truths.

Ostrich and Lark spend their days together, Lark singing from his perch in the tree and Ostrich silent, until Ostrich finds his voice.

Through the power of faith, a monk named Abba Jacob and his loyal rat terrier, Snook, are reunited after being separated by a ferocious storm.

A collection of poems and paintings paying tribute to the 1940''s all-female jazz band. The International Sweethearts of Rhythm originated in a boarding school in Mississippi and eventually found their way to the most famous ballrooms in the country, offering solace during the hard years of the war. Includes chronology of the band''s history.

ALSC Notable Children''s Book Here is the story of Miss Prudence Crandall and her black students, who endured the cruelty of prejudice and hateful actions for the sake of their education. Miss Crandall faced legal proceedings for opening her school of African American women. But her young students knew that Miss Crandall had committed no crime. They knew that the real criminals were the rich white residents of Canterbury, Connecticut, who had poisoned the school''s water and set fire to the schoolhouse. But hatred could not destroy their patience and compassion. From March of 1833 to September of 1834, when persecution forced the school to close, these African American women learned that they deserved an education. What they needed was the courage to go after it. Poets Elizabeth Alexander and Marilyn Nelson have re-created the remarkable story of Prudence Crandall''s school in this award-winning book, using the sonnet form with innovative style. Floyd Cooper''s powerful illustrations reveal the strength and vulnerability of Miss Crandall and her students.

Soaring images, rhythmic language, and wry humor come together in these three narrative poems that explore travel from an African American historical and social perspective. A cab ride turns into an amazing encounter with the driver, an amateur physicist whose ideas about space and time travel spark the poet''s musings on chutzpah and artistic ambition. A trip to Triolet, a Creole village in the Indian Ocean island nation of Mauritius, leads the poet to ponder the past and present as she reflects on the ironic complexities of the slave trade and its legacy shared by so many peoples. And in "The Cachoeira Tales," longing to take her family on a journey to "some place sanctified by the Negro soul," the poet finds herself in Brazil''s Bahia, along with a theater director, a jazz musician, a retired commercial pilot, an activist, a university student, and two mysterious African American women whom they meet along the way. In rhymed couplets, each pilgrim tells a story, and the result is a rollicking, sensual exploration of spirit and community, with a nod to Chaucer and to traditional Trickster tales. Using her remarkable ability to educate and inspire, Marilyn Nelson demonstrates the power of travel to transform our imaginations. We have long known that travel broadens; in these poems, it also deepens and makes wiser. Joined skin to skin, we moved like molecules in the great, impossible miracle of atmosphere, swaying to the music, all eyes on the stage, all hearts attuning themselves in beautiful polyrhythmy, one shaking booty. On one side of me a young man danced; I felt his muscled warmth flow into mine, his pure, sexual strength. On my other sides young women danced, whose curves bumped me softly, dancing without reserve, hands waving in the air, releasing scent fragrant as nard. We danced in reverent, silent assent to the praise-song of drums. -- from "Olodum" of "The Cachoeira Tales"

A Coretta Scott King and Printz honor book now in paperback. A Wreath for Emmett Till is "A moving elegy," says The Bulletin. In 1955 people all over the United States knew that Emmett Louis Till was a fourteen-year-old African American boy lynched for supposedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. The brutality of his murder, the open-casket funeral held by his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, and the acquittal of the men tried for the crime drew wide media attention. In a profound and chilling poem, award-winning poet Marilyn Nelson reminds us of the boy whose fate helped spark the civil rights movement.

Poems with a religious theme, the approach ranging from devotional to skeptical. In Sayings of the Desert Fathers, which is about a holy fool, she writes: "Big deal, / said Abba Jacob. / Miracles happen all the time. / We''re here, / aren''t we?"

Finalist for the 1991 National Book Award In The Homeplace, the stories of a family become the history of a people as Marilyn Nelson Waniek sketches the lives descended from her great-great-grandmother Diverne. The poet’s mother, Johnnie Mitchell Nelson, inspired this volume when she bequeathed to Waniek from her deathbed the tales that had shaped her life. The first section of the book presents those stories transformed into graceful, humorous, and deeply touching poems. In the book’s second section Waniek honors her late father, Melvin Nelson, and tells the story of his “family”: the fabled group of black World War II aviators known as the Tuskegee Airmen. Using the language and perspective of her father and his comrades, Waniek explores through a few of their individual stories the hardships and achievements of the thousand black flyers trained at Tuskegee Institute. Throughout The Homeplace, the reader is involved in a series of sharply portrayed lives. By telling a continuous story in a mix of free verse and traditional forms, Waniek gives her work pace and intensity. She handles the villanelle, the sonnet, and the popular ballad with equal skill and gusto. “I just knew we were going to live some history,” Johnnie Nelson said at the end of her life. Her daughter has produced an eloquent homage to that history, celebrating the survival of Afro-American pride.

“Waniek is a poet of intelligence, passion, and gentleness with a fine sense of the comic and unfailing judgment about what constitutes a poetic line. She creates a rich mixture of impressions about the speaker of these poems as a woman who is at the same time in her mid-twenties and her mid-fifties, who is black and white and red, who is both trapped by and freed by motherhood.” —Miller Williams Marilyn Nelson Waniek writes with great wisdom and compassion. Grounded but never earthbound, her poems speak honestly and eloquently about giving birth, nurturing life, and facing death; they inhabit the present, fully aware of their responsibilities to the past and the future. Waniek leaves us with the affecting strength and assurance of lasting things, as in the poem “Mama’s Promise.” But the dangerous highway curves through blue evenings when I hold his yielding hand and snip his minuscule nails with my vicious-looking scissors. I carry him around like an egg in a spoon, and I remember a porcelain fawn, a best friend’s trust, my broken faith in myself. It’s not my grace that keeps me erect as the sidewalk clatters downhill under my rollerskate wheels. Then I think of Mama, her bountiful breasts. When I was a child, I really swear, Mama’s kisses could heal. I remember her promise, and whisper it over my sweet son’s sleep: When you float to the bottom, child, like a mote down a sunbeam, you’ll see me from a trillion miles away: my eyes looking upon you, my arms outstretched for you like night. From “Mama’s Promise” published in Mama’s Promises by Marilyn Nelson. Copyright © 1985 by Marilyn Nelson Waniek. All rights reserved.