Nancy Owen Nelson’s poems appear in The South Dakota Review, Graffiti Rag, What Wildness Is This: Women Write About the Southwest, The MacGuffin, This/That Lit (online), and Oberon.
Her books include her memoirs, Searching for Nannie B (2015) and Divine Aphasia: A Woman’s Search for Her Father (2021); her poetry chapbook, My Heart Wears No Colors (FutureCycle Press, 2018) and Portals: A Memoir in Verse (Kelsay Books, 2019); and her full-length collection Five Points South: Poems from an Alabama Pilgrimage (Kelsay Books, 2022), which was chosen as the 2022 Book of the Year by the Alabama State Poetry Society.
Nelson earned her B.A, in English and French at Birmingham Southern, and her Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in English at Auburn University. She is the coordinator of the monthly Zoom program Poetry Vespers sponsored by the Unitarian Universalist Church of Detroit. She currently serves as Managing Editor of 7 Points Press in The Shoals, Alabama.
Most recently, Nelson has steered an effort to create a Poet Laureate for the City of Florence, Alabama.
Paperback: 60 pages
Publisher: Kelsay Books (February 21, 2026)