“Truth is such a rare thing,” Emily Dickinson said, “it is delightful to tell it.” Delightful perhaps to tell, but not always to hear, especially when, as in much of your writing, the truth is hard and the telling of it pierces the heart. Your genre-bending work, including the book-length poem Citizen: An American Lyric, illuminates with urgency and grief the everyday acts of racism that lurk beneath the headlines from Ferguson, from Charleston, from too many other places. “I am speaking,” you have said, “to the ways in which we are implicated in the architecture and the structure of our own democracy that allow these aggressions to happen.” Your work has been honored by The Academy of American Poets, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Lannan Foundation, and has won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Biblical prophets were those with a gift to see and the courage to confront the hidden forces that threatened the future of their culture. In this vein your own voice rises. The temptation to shut it out is strong. But you are well on your way to building, like your heroine Serena Williams, a body of work too powerful to ignore.
In recognition of your distinguished achievement in poetry, Williams College is proud to honor you with its Bicentennial Medal.
September 19, 2015
Megamenu Social