Marilyn Nelson graduated from the University of California-Davis, and holds graduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania (MA) and the University of Minnesota (PhD). Her books are For The Body (1978), Mama’s Promises (1985), The Homeplace (1990), Magnificat (1994), and The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems (1997), all published by LSU Press, and Carver: A Life In Poems (2001), published by Front Street Books. Her honors include two Pushcart Prizes, two creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the 1990 Connecticut Arts Award, an American Council of Learned Societies Contemplative Practices Fellowship, and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The Homeplace was a finalist for the 1991 National Book Award and won the 1992 Annisfield-Wolf Award. The Fields of Praise was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Award, the PEN Winship Award, and the Lenore Marshall Prize, and it won the 1998 Poets' Prize. Her rendition of Euripides' play, Hecuba, appears in Euripides I, the first volume of the Penn Greek Drama Series. Carver won the 2001 Boston Globe/Hornbook Award, was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award, was named a Newbery Medal Honor Book and a Coretta Scott King Honor Book, and won the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award. Nelson is a professor of English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, and Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut.