Who has the foresight to endow this important prize way back in 1935. Edith was the editor times anyways. She understood it was erasing the thing about racism and other forms of prejudice. She also understood, literature mr. As a posted an excerpt of the site. In the 84 years prize was established, our country has made Great Strides towards what is regard to respecting and embracing our diversity. Recently, we have taken disheartening steps backwards. Reported hate crimes of sharply risen in the past several years including of course the mass murders and the mothering manual church in Charleston South Carolina and the tree of live synagogue in pittsburgh, pennsylvania. This is the National Trend but it also gives its close to home. According to the southern poverty law center, there are more organized groups in the state of ohio than in kentucky and West Virginia combined. A great source of shame if ever there was one. But also. Follow action. They must rewrite our Current National narrative to vigorously oppose bigotry and all of its forms. [applause] and i ceremony provides an opportunity to energize that sense of purpose. This is the 16th year in which ive had the distinct privilege of opening this book awards. This ceremony always brings me so much joy and hope and all of you feel the same answer. But tonight, my joy is intertwined with deep sorrow. These is my first book awards. In which the seat next to me wont be occupied by my beloved friend predecessor and mentor, stephen messer. [applause] with the exception of edith herself, no one is more associated with this award ceremonies d. Steve made this if it national importance. And it was steve who enlisted doctor gate to chair the journey. His passion for this if it, and all that it stands for, was unmatched. C was one of clevelands great champions for social justice and he personified dignity which he actually maintained even through the barriers that he had overcome. Two years ago, while receiving her award for Lifetime Achievement, civilian stated quote when in doubt, ask yourself what is the most generous thing to do. See mentor, was never in doubt. His moral compass always pointed true north. But he was unwaveringly generous. In every way. Tonight, our Award Winners will touch our hearts as they always do. But their words and sentiments will shine even brighter from the blow of steves enduring legacy legacy which i would like to honor now not by a moment of. [silence] but by rising in a standing ovation all of us or our dear friend who was and always will be a moral conscience and role model for our city in the nation. [applause] [applause] thank you so much. And now, as steve would want me to say, the show will joyfully go on. In keeping with recent traditions, i would now like to we will a young poet to the stage, logan greer, logan is the fifthgrader at Camas International school. Part of the Cleveland Metropolitan School district. Please join me in welcoming logan as she reads her problem, city of growing up. [applause] city of growing up. City of pleasant party people city with gangs. City with learning city before harness, before being anxious. City that believes in god. City like a flower growing the brand. City chatting grounded theory. City paralyzed for movement. City with depression. City examining the streets. City of so long grove the left out. With my family. City of angry people writing to lose. City of my grandma his macaroni. City of my live. But back. [background sounds] thank you 11, that was beautiful. Finally i would like to we will some special guests who are with us tonight. It would not be actually former poet from the United States injured her rita, and africa david. [inaudible conversation] National Treasure who is here with her wonderful husband and our dear friend fred. So we will rita and fred. [applause] and last but certainly not least, our esteemed and treasured longtime mc for the evening, doctor Henry Louis Gates junior. [applause] as you all know, skip gates was the founding and chair of the awards jury. In a hundred other wonderful things i could say about skip and all of that he but you know him. We are blessed to have skip as our host once again this evening. And we are very grateful to him for his many decades of service book awards. So please join me in welcoming our mc my dear friends, skip. [applause] give it up bronze ladies and gentlemen. [applause] [background sounds] my names. Look lets give it up for logan greer. [applause] can you imagine doing that at ten years old. The child is in the fifth grade. But shes going to harvard. Im going to predict that right now. I love that poem city of growing up. Give it up one more time for logan. [applause]. Ellipsis. And when it all starts, he and o dell back him are going to be unstoppable. I predict that. Until october 27. [laughter] as i hope you know by now, i do love this city which had more than 100 events this spring to commemorate the river catching on fire 50 years ago. [laughter] now it has more books on it then bostons own river, charles. I love a good comeback story. [applause] we are gathered here tonight really for one reason and thats because we love literature. We love stories and poems and we love words whether they are delivered through poetry, fiction or nonfiction. Weve recognized for writers tonight who in their very different styles and genres rendered visible the invisible. They give light to those people in history that have been a raise and these writers come to us because the remarkable readership of the foundation. Give it up for the leadership and the great work of the Cleveland Foundation for just need to make possible. I also want to give a shout out to my main man moss junior both of them in the audience tonight. Ive been interviewing people all over the country and asked them to name the ministers of all times in the top five. Otis moss junior is on every list. Ladies and gentlemen, give it up up. [applause] we should pause to offer my own remembrance about whom one spoke very movingly and as he said it is only because of steve that im with you tonight. Steve approached me about revitalizing the book award to make them a Major National pri pride. He also saw the spirit of inclusion and diversity as the spirit in his beloved cleveland could embody. He introduced me to an associate whose collaboration he told me would be indispensable to achieving the vision that he had for this revitalized series of prizes and as soon as i met her i realized he was absolutely right that i had met my soulmate and her name is mary louise. So, steve, we set out together to reinvigorate the idea that he was the person who thought it possible and decided that it could be done, it was important to be done and he was going to make sure that it was done in the right way. Tonight we celebrate the patient, his leadership, his imagination, his commitment and his love of the great city of cleveland ohio. One of his daughters is here with us tonight. Please give robin the warmest embrace and welcome as we remember the joy and openness that her father expressed in all of his lifes work. [applause] wevwe have lost someone also vy dear to us this year a daughter of lorain ohio 30 miles west. Chloe enriches all immeasurably and my dear friend herself of course a writer of no small talent will now say a few words in remembrance of our beloved toni. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome rita. [applause] good evening. When i was a graduate student in iowa city, i wondered if the universitys libraries one afternoon and then behind my shoulder i couldnt shake the feeling that a book was looking for me. Right at eye level i pulled from the shelf, read the first pages and knew that i was home. Since that discovery over four decades ago, no words can fully express what Toni Morrison has meant to me as a writer, a woman, a black woman and a fellow ohio in from the rain just 50 miles from my hometown of akron and less than 30 miles from here as you all know. At a time when i the only africanamerican student in the iowa writers workshop could have easily been consumed by bitterness she taught me to step back as a poet and to Pay Attention to everything but it took in everything without prejudice. With an extraordinary poetic economy and her signature elegance, Toni Morrison burst a host of complex characters that we as readers recognize as familiar conflicted beings and no matter if we like or despise their behavior, except in the way of family. When i introduced tony in 2015 for the National Book critics circle top honor. It was like introducing the goddess athena while she looked on with her gray eyes please listen as some of our authors remember Toni Morrison. There are great things, her humor, open hand to so many writers but what moved me most is to the International Platform without us losing our identity. Praise for Toni Morrison, praise bride and her black beauty, sweetness, rain, cold, they milkmen did find his wings. Praise mendelian, praised mercy, praised the blessed earth, praised the dateless gate of eternity and a great mothers legacy and who shall finally reclaim her name. Toni morrisons death may come as a shock because her words seem so evergreen even eternal as they explore. In ways unparalleled she was not alone in doing so. She let us know she was in the tradition of Langston Hughes and unknown enslaved person she dared give the name and who guide us through the hard times. She helped us see ourselves and free ourselves and reminds us as she put it the function of freedom is to free someone else. I was a brandnew assistant editor of the review. When encountered by Toni Morrison on the first page was that this had been a mistake. How could i come in Office Editor lay hands on the pros of the literary era. She disagreed with a few of the changes after we discussed it and after some length you have proved to them. Toni morrison wrote to us again and again exporting our beauty and making us grapple reaffirming our humanity. Every word, every sentence in an embrace and every paragraph they say i know you, icu, we are together. We prayed and sang and danced. She loved us she loved us at our best and broken and made us experience and understand ourselves for kindness with all that we have survived and all we had not. All we have made, all we have become. Now that she is gone. [applause] theres one more person i need to mention, the Guiding Force of the evening. The person who makes sure that every detail is in place. The person who does so much to bring us all together, my friend, caring long. [applause] to celebrate literature that explores, celebrates and complicates Race Relations but its caring who brings the dream tonight. Give it up for care karen long. [applause] now lets talk about tracy k. Smith when Pulitzer Prize winner tracy smith was in the water during the twoyear tenure as the poet laureate of the United States, critics were amazed at the ambition and the sweeping scope of her topics. Upon reading the collection for the first time, i was struck by its echoes of walt whitman and its range of concerns and im not alone in this. The atlantics review is for the work contains multitudes among the gorgeous meditations and experiences as mother and daughter they speak truth to power in the american context including a heartbreaking section come from thing slaveholding and the civil war and throughout the collection it permeates the imagery not surprisingly. Smith has reported in the New York Times interview i was in aspiring transcendentalist from a young age explaining the fascination, smith cites the excitement she felt on reading Emily Dickinson and the calling Mission Essay to harvard was on. The author notes that she has been moved, changed, deepened and inspired by Toni Morrison. This lyrical intertwining of the sensibility and African American literary tradition informs this reckoning with American History. Fritz briley and wide ranging currents of injustice in america, wait in th wade in thes this years recipient of the book prize for poetry. It references the africanamerican spiritual that instructs runaway slaves to wade in the water to evade bloodhounds and capture. As smith claims in the Washington Square review, the experience of attending the performance inspired her to write about the experience with its sense of love and deliverance of compassion, of justice and survival. Not only does it achieve these goals but the reader is simultaneously immersed in the water imagery which goes throughout the book. Gathered, shed, spread, then forgotten, reabsorbed. One of the most personal describes traveling during the early months of a pregnancy. The mother orders bottle after bottle of water denying her own desire for the red wine but the water that is lifesustaining and another can become poisono poisonous. With the cap in snow and a brilliant chemical blue. It is especially powerful in subject and in the form. They are what are known as blackout were found poems and whicinwhich parts of the previoy existing text she was making the review continue and making visible the words of slaves and the africanamericans enlisted in the civil war these are the poems of people who are lost. One of them concerns a letter opposing the emancipation of slaves. Smith presents a plea ended in a letter written to president lincoln in 1864. Mr. President , it is my desire to be free, to go see my people on the eastern shore. Another letter from 1864 from a wounded soldier to his children takes on a more defiant tone. They were put together by smiths sense of timing and feel for the kind of language appropriate to the poem. The violence that permeates the American National identity and the collection also offers in the spiritual world permeating ordinary life and god comes down from the hills and his cheap to observe the canyons, the live oaks and the tiny flowers that grow frantic caller at his feet and the narrator is visited by two spiritual messengers. She writes thereby some have entertained angels unaware and a great poet with a symbol and love you. She didnt know me but i believed her. It is repeated many times and the narrators feelings are pierced suddenly by pillars of heavy light transcending the confines of the world. There is hardly a better image for the multiple ways in which the poems invite us to transcend the confines of our world into the current history of American Life and the winner of the 2019 anisfield book award for poetry. [applause] the professor was one of my most generous and inspiring professors decades ago when i was an undergraduate at harvard and hearing me speak about my work was so moving. I am deeply honored to receive this years book award in poetry. Im grateful to be in the company of the other awards and because all of the writers are adamant readers whove been taught to see and feel and recognize the world differently by the work of other writers i am to be welcomed into the community of past recipients, writers of vision and conscience and craft. I write poetry because i have questions and fears and anxieties and they helped me to struggle through what worries me and to work through something that might be helpful even just momentarily. I think that wade in the water is something that came about because i have questions about america. I have concerns about the country that i belong to and that i love. My books are wrestling with america in one way or another, but that this moment where there is a sense of Fraud Division into so many of us feel the gains that had been made by generations who fought and worked before us have been pulled back a little bit my urge to seek and question a new kind of weight and urgency. I think of it as a book that seeks to center the history and experience of black people in this country, but generative democracy loving and forgiving struggling spirit of life that i think had made this country magnificent in all the ways that it is i wanted to center and is a great that and think about questions fundamental as we pertain to freedom and democracy, justice and more than anything they need to make amends that continue to hamstring us even in this mome moment. I was thinking about all that and worry was alive in my mind, history activated that in new ways but also illuminated a vocabulary for love that was so surprising if necessary for me and all of us and i am hoping that maybe together we can find a way that the vocabulary of love and compassion can become even more vital to our citizenship and a sense of civic discourse. I hope that together we can learn to honor and cherish and protect one another in the ways that democracy suggests are possible. I will read a little bit from wade in the water and i would like to start off with the title wave in the water for the ring shouters one of the women greeted me. I love you, she said. She didnt know me, but i believed her and it rolled over in my chest like a room where the drapes have been swept back. She continued down the hall, past other strangers each pierced by pillars of heavy light. I love you throughout the industry handclap, every stop. I love you in the rusted iron chains someone was made to drag until love with them emptying the center. The angles of it scraping shouldering past the swirling dust modes and it did teams of light that we know we could let ourselves feel due to claim. O. Tres, girl, run. Miraculous many gone. Where does this love that trouble you, this. This is a column that i wrote thinking about what it feels like to live in a nation that doesnt always recognize you and a community that doesnt always recognize you or see you in good faith and it sat for a while without a title and it announced its