Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver is one of America’s most celebrated and best-selling poets. She was born in 1935 in Cleveland, Ohio, and raised in the nearby suburb Maple Heights.
The Poetry Foundation wrote of her childhood, “She would retreat from a difficult home to the nearby woods, where she would build huts of sticks and grass and write poems. She attended both Ohio State University and Vassar College, but did not receive a degree from either institution.” Despite this, Mary taught at many colleges and universities and received Honorary Doctorates from The Art Institute of Boston, Dartmouth College, Marquette University, and Tufts University.
Mary Oliver’s poetry frequently describes nature and all its beauty and the quiet lives of wildlife. In her review of Oliver’s poetry, Maxine Kumin wrote that Oliver “stands quite comfortably on the margins of things, on the line between earth and sky, the thin membrane that separates human from what we loosely call animal.”
Throughout her writing career, she received numerous awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for American Primitive and the National Book Award in 1992 for New and Selected Poetry. She also received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She won the American Academy of Arts & Letters Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize, and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award.
Mary Oliver passed away at age 83 on January 17, 2019.
