Artists award (2004), and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Her poetry collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), was a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She received a PEN/Beyond Margins Award for her Recyclopedia (2006). She is also credited for rediscovering the novel Oreo, published in 1974 by Fran Ross. Mullen won the fourth annual Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers in 2010. She appears in the documentary film The Black Candle, directed by M. K. Asante, Jr. and narrated by Maya Angelou. Background Mullen has stated that she was brought up in Fort Worth, Texas, but that her family is originally from Pennsylvania. Growing up in such a small black community was hard especially because, as Mullen has said in interviews, "a black Southern vernacular was spoken, which my family didn't speak." This created a division between Mullen and her peers who considered her an outsider for speaking "white." Language Mullen recalls on the different languages that she learned as a child as opposed to those around her. When one hears the term different languages one thinks of languages that are spoken in other far away foreign places, yet Mullen is discussing the different types of English that are spoken in her community. The English she grew up learning was considered to be the “Standard English,” which is summed up as the proper way of speaking English, the one that will make black people more approachable in a nice part of town, the English that will make a person of color employable. The black vernacular is considered to be incorrect, and if people only spoke this vernacular they would be considered uneducated. This did not sit well with Mullen because she wanted black children to understand that being black and educated were not mutually exclusive terms. Mullen says that she does not believe that certain vernaculars are particularly educated or uneducated; society has however decided for them that there is a right way of speaking and a wrong way. Influences Language is the bridge that can connect two different cultures, and Mullen experienced the opposite of that when she was growing up at first. The "Standard English" she spoke created a barrier for her she could not anticipate. As it does for many other black children that speak "proper" and are considered different