Mary Oliver

(1935 - 2019)

Born in Cleveland in 1935, Mary Oliver published her first poetry collection, No Voyage and Other Poems, in 1963. She received a Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive in 1984. Oliver said in an interview in 1992, “I don’t know why I felt such affinity with the natural world except that it was available to me; that’s the first thing. It was right there. And for whatever reasons, I felt those first important connections, those first experiences being made with the natural world rather than with the social world.”