by Candace Barrington

Marilyn Nelson has won the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, an annual prize recognizing “outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.” Part of Nelson’s legacy is The Cachoeira Tales, her 2005 adaptation of The Canterbury Tales recounting a family pilgrimage to places made holy by the (entire) Black experience in the western hemisphere. In many ways, her reimagining of the medieval pilgrimage helped ignite interest in Chaucer’s work by twenty-first century poets, especially women of the African diaspora.

For a useful primer on this wave of appropriations, see Kathleen Forni’s Chaucer’s Afterlife: Adaptations in Recent Popular Culture (McFarland 2013).