Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver (born September 10, 1935) is an American poet who has won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The New York Times described her as "far and away, this country's best-selling poet." 2Early life Mary Oliver was born to Edward William and Helen M. V. Oliver on September 10, 1935, in Maple Heights, Ohio, a semi-rural suburb of Cleveland. Her father was a social studies teacher and an athletics coach in the Cleveland public schools. Oliver began writing poetry at the age of 14. At 17 she visited the home of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, in Austerlitz, New York, where she then formed a friendship with the late poet's sister Norma. Oliver and Norma spent the next six to seven years at the estate organizing Edna St. Vincent Millay's papers. Oliver studied at Ohio State University and Vassar College in the mid-1950s, but did not receive a degree at either college. 2Adult life and career Oliver’s first collection of poems, No Voyage and Other Poems, was published in 1963, when she was 2