The Ohio Connection

• Mary Oliver was born in Maple Heights, outside Cleveland, in 1935. Her father, Edward W. Oliver, was a social studies teacher and athletic coach in the Cleveland public schools.
• Her love for nature, so vital and integral to her poetry, began with her childhood in Ohio. Read this excerpt from a 1992 interview with Stephen Ratiner:

Ratiner: What led you to your bond with the natural world? I'm assuming it began when you were very young.

Oliver: Well, yes, I think it does or does not happen when one is young… I grew up in a small town in Ohio… It was pastoral, it was nice, it was an extended family. 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. I think…the first way you take meaning from the physicality of the world, from your environment, probably never leaves you.

• Mary graduated from Maple Heights High School in 1953.
• She attended The Ohio State University for two years, from 1955 to 1956.
• She published The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems in 1972
• Even though she never finished her college degree, Mary Oliver was a Mather Visiting Professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland in 1980 and 1982.
• In 1984 she gave a week-long seminar in poetry for the creative writing department at Ohio State.
• She was an Elliston Visiting Professor at the University of Cincinnati in 1986.
• She won the Ohioana Book Award for New and Selected Poems in 1993.

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