Writers from around the world gathered on the stage of the Ohio Theater in downtown Cleveland to accept a prestigious literary prize, Thursday night. Over the course of eight decades, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards have honored the achievements of such noted authors as Toni Morrison, Junot Diaz, and Martin Luther King, Jr. To celebrate the Awards’ 80 th anniversary, poetry is being recognized as a new category in a long-running national conversation about race.
Jericho Brown says he’s gotten used to suspicious looks and muttered comments, as one of the few African Americans in his suburban Atlanta neighborhood. But, even he was surprised when a police officer followed him into his driveway, one day.
"He walks up to me and starts asking me questions, you know, in the front yard of my house," Brown laughs with incredulity. "My house, that I am paying the mortgage on. And this has been the case in my life, since I was 14-15 years old."
Brown turns his rage over such incidents into poetry.
Show me
A man who tells his children
The police will protect them
And I'll show you the son of a man
Who taught his children where
To dig....
--- From: "The Interrogation" © 2014 Jericho Brown
That’s an excerpt from Brown’s 2014 collection, The New Testament, one of this year’s Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winners. Pulitzer Prize winning poet Rita Dove has been an Anisfield-Wolf juror for twenty years. She says that poetry is a powerful voice:
"The poem can concentrate a particular instant, draws the reader or the person who is in the audience, into that moment so that they have to live it with you."
Cleveland poet and philanthropist Edith Anisfield Wolf created the prizes in 1935 to honor books that make a contribution to a better understanding of race and diversity, and to honor her father’s passion for social justice. Awards manager Karen Long notes that focus has evolved and expanded from Wolf’s original idea.
"She was thinking black, white, Jewish, basically," says Long . "Now, there are books that confront tensions around the Muslim-Christian worlds, transgender identity, Asian-American experience…"
"I was born in Hong Kong, and I was raised in Portland Oregon," says Marilyn Chin, who is also an Anisfield-Wolf poetry winner this year. "At that time, there weren’t that many Asian families, and so I was bullied, beat-up a lot."
Chin says she writes heroine figures to talk back to the past.
"I am an immigrant poet, and I have lost a lot." There's a wistfulness in her voice. "I’ve lost Hong Kong, pretty much. The building of my birth is gone; it’s been replaced by a mall.
But, Chin's work also addresses what she sees around her today. This excerpt from her book Hard Love Province explores diversity through the perceptions of children:
One child has brown eyes, one has blue
One slanted, another rounded
One so nearsighted he squints internal
One had her extra epicanthic folds removed
One downcast, one couldn’t be bothered
One roams the heavens for a perfect answer....
--- From: "One Child Has Brown Eyes" © 2014 Marilyn Chin
Awards juror Rita Dove says both Marilyn Chin and Jericho Brown channel feelings of helplessness and rage as a way of pushing through such emotions to a place of forgiveness.
"They talk about difference," she says. They write about the pain, and then, they also say, 'I am open to the world.' We need to open ourselves to this world that we live in, if we’re going to live in it with any kind of dignity and fullness."
Despite the long roster of well-known writers who have taken home the Anisfield-Wolf Award, and despite the fact that the winners get cash prizes equal to the Pulitzers or the National Book Awards, Anisfield-Wolf remains a relatively unknown honor. Awards manager Karen Long suspects she knows why.
"Things that address race are considered, sometimes in the larger culture, as homework," she says, "or broccoli, or 'good for you'".
That’s right, says Jericho Brown. They can be good for you. They can teach you …tenderness.
"Those moments of tenderness, those moments of intimacy, I think are the moments in poetry that tell us the real way to solve some of these problems. And that has to do with the simple consideration of one another as human beings."
Jericho Brown and Marilyn Chin join historians Richard Dunn and David Brion Davis, and novelist Marlon James for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards ceremony. They become part of a conversation that’s still going strong, after 80 years.
