Marilyn is of Cree/Métis descent. Her family originally from Kikino Settlement, Alberta. A Really Good Brown Girl won the 1997 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award presented by the League of Canadian Poets. This collection is now in its 15th printing and published in a special edition by Brick Books 2015. Selections from this first collection are widely anthologized in elementary, secondary and post-secondary literary texts. Her second collection, green girl dreams Mountains, won the 2001 Stephan G. Stephansson Award from the Writer's Guild of Alberta. Her third collection, that tongued belonging, was awarded the 2007 McNally Robinson Aboriginal Poetry Book of the Year and the McNally Robinson Aboriginal Book of the Year. The Pemmican Eaters is her newest collection published by ECW Press, 2015. Marilyn has been the 2014/15 Online Writer-in-Residence with ARC Poetry Society of Canada. She has also served as Writer in Residence at the Edmonton Public Library, the Universities of Alberta, Brandon, Grant MacEwan, Toronto-Massey College, and Windsor. She has been faculty at the Banff Centre in programs such as Writing with Style and Wired Writing, and she has advised and mentored in the Aboriginal Emerging Writers' Program. She serves as a board member on the Public Lending Rights Commission of Canada, and freelances for a living in Edmonton. She is working on a new collection of poetry, Amiskwaciwaskahikan-Beaver Hills House before Edmonton.