image, the spirit of 1776, and then we have john wayne and william shatner and then someone who is not eric, bears a slight resemibalance to him but is not for legal reasons. [laughter] but we thought that captured the spirit of the book, showing that american popular culture has its roots in 1776. >> host: and paul cantor is the author of this book, "the invisible hand in popular culture: liberty v. authority in american film and tv." thank you for joining us. >> guest: well, thank you for having me here. it was a great pleasure. >> visit booktv.org to watch any of the programs you see here online. type the author or book title in the search bar on the upper left side of the page and click search. you can also share anything you see on booktv.org easily by clicking share on the upper left side of the page and selecting the format. booktv streams live online for

48 hours every weekend with top nonfiction books and authors. booktv.org. >> the 78th annual anisfield-wolf book awards that recognized books that have made important contributions to our understanding of racism and our appreciation of the rich diversity of human cultures is next on booktv. this is about an hour, 40 minutes. [applause] >> thank you. thank you. good evening, everyone. >> good evening. >> you know, i love coming to cleveland for this annual event. i look forward to it, i enjoy every minute of it. , and it just grows and grouse. thank you for your loyalty -- grows. thank you for your loyalty, thank you for your support, and thank you for all your enthusiasm. give it up to yourselves for being such a great audience. ms. -- [applause]

>> you know, every time i think about this prize, i think a poet, a poet in the 1930s who happened to be a white woman endows one of the first, certainly, if not the first prizes in celebration of what today we would call excellence and diversity. i mean, what an extraordinary person, -- edith anisfield-wolf. it used to be nicknamed the black pulitzer prize, at least uptown. langston hughes won it, hur stomp was on the cover of the saturday review in 1941 for winning it. martin luther king himself won it. twenty-five years ago under the leadership of ashley montague, who's a dear friend, it began to be transformed to focus on artistic excellence and what today we would call, use the buzz word cultural diversity.

ashley put me on the selection committee, and then when he passed, the foundation generously asked if i would be the chair. and so we restructured it, and i asked my friends, steven pinker and a fellow man i met at the university of cambridge, simon -- [inaudible] who's remained a good friend, i asked if they would compose a jury, and they agreed to, and that's been so many years ago that i can't even remember. we have a row cowsly good time arguing about these 400 books, i tell you that. it's a miracle, you guys, any of you have won. [laughter] but, you know, it takes actual people on the ground, you knowsome you can theorize what a prize should be and how splendid and rewarding an event should unfold, but it takes people on the ground to particularize that vision, to manifest it.

and i think that it is befitting if we all join in celebrating, honoring, thanking the person who for so many years epitomized the spirit of edith anisfield-wolf, and she retired from this position last year because her husband was ill. but she and i over the years have become very, very good friends, and those of you in the know, as we say, know that there wouldn't be this marvelous event without mary louise hunt. please give it up for mary louise hunt. stand up, mary louise. [applause] and, mary louise, you know, so many people are so pernicious that it would be after be the flood, right? so they say, well, if i have to

retire, i want you to miss me by realizing how important i was because your event falls apart. [laughter] you all know what i'm talking about. [laughter] not mary louise. mary louise hand-picked her successor who was the hut area journalist, karen long. and we've worked with her for a year. [applause] yes, please, stand up. so now it is show time, as they say. as be of you know, i have something of an interest in genealogy, in the art and science of mapping one's origins. whether using the latest in dna testing and technology or old-fashioned archive digging, the search not only for one's origins, but for understanding them is a key to the present is compelling, it's addictive, and in the best of circumstances,

generaltive. it's this last quality that is evident on every page of eugene gloria's third collection of poems called "my favorite warlord," the winner of in the year's anisfield-wolf book award for poetry. the poems this in this book generate a geography of the poet's life. they map out his exploration of home and exile, place and displacement, departure and arrival and, ultimately, of return. there are touchstones -- excuse me, there are touchstones throughout. the warlord, his father, his brother and the murdered chinese-american vincent chen, for instance, recur throughout the book plotting points along the writer's path. we find that one name, one place or even one year can resonate multiply and provide the reader different directions at different points in the poet's journey.

let's take one example, the year 1967, for instance. ask that's the name of the poem -- and that's the name of the poem in which a famed photographer in san francisco looking for images of freaks while, quote, all of us stayed, all of us stayed put in our small but brilliant constellation managing to escape unscathed from the camera's long gaze. it is also the year he writes, curiously enough, in which a nigerian named we'll su yen coe is being hauled to jail on trumped-up charges. that very year in 1967 so important for the arts and politics as these poems attest is also markedly important in his personal life. in the poem "detroit," it's the year he thinks of when his

mother-in-law, and i quote: this woman who hands me a bean cake comes to his mind also as, quote: the woman she was in 1967 giving birth to my wife. what i find so resonant in all of these poems, ladies and gentlemen, is the idea of multiplicity, that we possess many identities stemming from the many diverse forces that have shaped us. in gloria's case from filipino background through education among theup ins in a catholic l school -- the nuns in a catholic school to coming of age in the same neighborhood in which, and i quote: janis joplin shored up supplies from our corner chinese grocer, a line from his delightful poem, "new zealand." the book's second poem here on earth in which the poet and his wife ordered their favorites in a chinese restaurant sets the tone of the volume for me, and i

quote: the booths were lit by bright faces, vietnamese, thai, chinese and filipino, hundreds of years on their faces. schoolteachers, witnesses of terror, readers of czech cover, office clerks with inner lives. in the same moment and at the same place, we can all be -- and indeed we all are -- so many different things at the very same time. my favorite warlord is eugene gloria's third book of poetry. the first two are drivers of the short-time motel from the year and hoodlum birds. robert pinsky said that if -- and i quote, it demonstrates a depth of language. the power to get past the first services of words and things. or to put it differently, he continues, the power to hear

harmonies beyond the obvious ones, finding new undertones of meaning. new undertones of meaning, i like that. gloria's honors include a fulbright scholar grant, the poetry society of america, george bog with en memorial award, a national poetry theory selection, an asian-american literary award, san francisco art commission grant and the pushcart prize. he's had fellowships and residencies at mcdowell colony, the jurassi resident artist program and the virginia center for creative arts among many others. this past spring he was bowling green university's distinguished visiting writer. born in manila -- in the philippines, of course -- in 1957, he grew up in san francisco and earned his bachelor's degree at san francisco state, his master's degree at miami university and an mfa at the university of oregon. he's currently professor of

english at depaul university in indiana. it is with good reason that my favorite warlord was the first selection for discussion in the brown bag book club at the ohio center for the book at the cleveland public library which will feature each of the books being honored tonight through the month of october. ladies and gentlemen, for his deep exploration of origins and identities and for his lyrical embrace of difference and diversity, eugene gloria is the recipient of the 2013 anisfield-wolf book award for poetry. [applause] ♪ ♪

>> i thought we were going to share that tblas. [laughter] the a communal thing. thank you all very, very much for being here tonight to help us celebrate this wonderful award. and thank you, professor gates, for that wonderful introduction. i'm deeply touched. and, you know, i just hope i don't fall apart here. but i'll do my best. i'll begin with a poem about end in lis -- indianapolis. it's a poem that dr. gates mentioned earlier. and i'll read about three poems. i'll start with that. here on earth. imagine the pleasure inside the

storm, the foam rush from rain gutters. imagine yourself here inside a restaurant on an unlit street. say it is a bad neighborhood, even after the rain. take the immigrant face of our waiter who is also the proprietor. say, peter, it's been weeks. we've come to eat. we've been hankering for your finishing a. we come. we know what we want, the same meal we always order. me the number one appetizer, my wife the number three. for our entrees, the number 38 and the number 30. the booths here are lit by bright faces; vietnamese, thai, chinese and filipino, hundreds of years on their faces. schoolteachers, witnesses of terror, readers of checkov, office clerks with inner lives. then the salon man in a dress shirt with silver cuff links

moseys in to pick up his takeout order. he is tall and pockmarked like my father. he could also be my father except for the dyed blond hair. over the number one and the number three appetizers, we are speculating, my wife and i. where are -- where the salaryman comes from, manila or saigon, but here comes peter with our facing shining. inside this booth my moon face is a lantern in the mainstream lengthening, lengthening. here on earth we are curtained by rain, a subset in the far corners floating toward the center. we are an island in landlocked america. we are thai, fill pee mow and vietnamese. we are, all of us, post-exotics.

[applause] this next poem is about san francisco. it features my sister in a very difficult light, but i apologized to her already in advance for making a poem out of her bad experience. this is called "dal gory --al gory of the land mat." another romance, her third if one month. how could she hope that his love would remain steadfast when he learned her shameful secret? it was 1967, and the phenomenal world tethered on the brink of laundry baskets and record snowfall in chicago. astronauts burning in their space capsule, we'll so lin ca being hauled to jail on

trumped-up charges. here comes the night, was what my sister heard the band re hearsing on the rooftop three yards away. the hippie drummer waved his drumsticks, my sister wishing for a van morrison song. this was the year cherry was ambushed, the -- [inaudible] would seek refuge in spanish harlem and pluck chickens on a porch stoop, the year my sister was almost raped at a laundromat on a saturday in the haight. my sister negotiating between delicates and perma press, between dark and semidark socks with danger and romance. there was no escaping that task of laundry, loads upon nuanced loads she carted from our flat. she was indentured not to nuns who took in troubled teens from good families, but to a mother

at work on a weekend. when a man loves a woman played on a scratched 45 over and over from the tomboy's bedroom below our flat. there was no escaping the oily man in a brown derby jacket in that near empty land to mat that afternoon. he came from behind and put his left hand across her mouth and his other on her crotch just when she was about to read emily loring describe the waywardness of the heart to the rhythm of the rinse cycle. here comes the night was not playing in her head, but the drummer walked in on them and spooked her attacker. the hippie drummer with his dopey labrador was on his way to the park. vietnam, the six-day bar, black riots and newark and detroit, all that bedlam and rage, and it was hotter than imnolating monk in july. who gives a hoot about the flood of runaways from nebraska? who gives a whit about the

indelicate balance of our weekly wash? [applause] and i'll close with this poem. this is a love poem, a love poem for my wife, a love poem to the city of detroit. detroit. sorry. detroit. my wife carries the city like a pebble in the heel of her sock. my mother-in-law with her dour smile hands me a bean cake from the front seat. we are driving through belle isle. we come here for holidays and family. in the hub of the wheel that is the city hangs a boxer's hand. joe lewis' giant fist. nobody seems to like this thing.

why, i can't say for sure. does it honor a man who behaved well, observed all the cardinal rules of jim crow? malcolm x met cassius clay here in 1962 at a lunch net. -- luncheon net. maybe you saw the photo of them. joe lewis, the tan tornado, didn't pay no mind to young cassius clay even later after ali whupped sonny liston. nobody likes a misbehaving black man, even when he's right. in 1967 ali said, man, i ain't got no quarrel with them viet cong. suspended from the ring, ali would come around again. in belle isle trees testify to urban blight, and i am trying to locate the history of my fear. the chairs of our dining set are made from fruitwood trees,

chairs hand crafted in italy bequeathed to us by my mother-in-law who bought the set from hudson's. tree branches, foliage, roots and vines, everything is spreading across america. let me honor this woman who hands me a bean cake and the woman she was in 1967 giving birth to my wife. let me bless this car containing our picnic through belle isle across the detroit river and the long drive back to where the past is heaped and folded like an animal asleep on the soft shoulder of the road. [applause] thank you. ♪ ♪ >> wonderful. thank you very much.

i was fascinated to learn from an interview that laird hunt gave to indiana university that the seeds of his novel "kind one" were not a reading that he did on slavery in the united states or in his studies of william faulkner. moving from freedom in indiana across the ohio river to slavery in kentucky, the novel has often been called faulknerian with its multiple narrators and its physical and metaphysical shifts, shifts of time and place. but, in fact, hunt pinpoints the start of his thinking for this novel in a course he took on the history of the caribbean slave trade and the haitian revolution. two worlds of the caribbean in which slavery was even more brutal and in which human beings were seen as much more disposable than here in the united states and that of the haitian revolution in which

african slaves and their descendants successfully coffer threw their -- overthrew their tyrannical masters for the first time in human history. the fist time in human history that slaves overthrew their masters and set up an independent, in their case, republic. these two worlds were translated by hunt's rich imagination into what the "atlanta journal-constitution" calls, and i quote: a haunting meditation on the crushing legacy of slavery in the american south. it is for this profound act of translation and reimagination that laird hunt is the recipient of this year's anisfield-wolf book award for fiction. like the films django unchained and steve mcqueen's stunning, haunting film about to be released in october, "twelve years a slave," "kind one" explores unflinchingly what the

cleveland plain dealer calls the souls of american horror. jenny lancaster's 14 years old when she's taken as the new wife of her second cousin, linus lancaster, from her home in indiana to his pig farm over in kentucky. the lush promises of this new world evaporate immediately in the face of its violent, dehumanizing reality wherein linus' cruelty to jenny herself is mitigated only by his regular rape and torture of his two young black female slaves. cleomi and zinia. jenny herself inflicts beatings on these girls. she is a grotesque copy of linus, salvaging her only shred of power by violating and further dehumanizing the girls. after linus is killed, the girls rise up against jenny and put

shackles on her. underlining this story is the sad sense that there might have been sisterhood possibly there. jenny is nearly the same age as the girls, after all, and linus has beaten her and burned her books. cutting her off from language and culture in a free woman's version of enslavement. but hunt never lets us forget that slavery, the ownership of one human being by another human being, can never be anything but intimately brutal and transmogrifying. the kim cuts review called "kind one" strikingly original and deeply moving book. the author calls it skin-tingling, gorgeous, terrifying. i returned to the idea of translation in thinking about this book. think about it.

translation is an act of carrying over language, ideas and beliefs from one place as it were to another place. slavery forces translation to a new place at the same time, if you think about it, that it seeks to make it impossible by killing language, by killing culture, by attempting to kill my vestige of the past. "kind one" shows that these vestages always -- vestiges always remain, and the elements that give us our humanity are not so easily done away with. "kind one" was a finalist for the 2013 penn-faulkner award for fiction. it's hunt's fifth novel, and he has published in france, japan, italy, spain, germany and turkey. his is sixth novel, "never home," will be published by little brown in the united states. it comes as no surprise, perhaps, that hunt is a translator as well. translator of english works into

french and of french works into english. hunt is the author of numerous stories, reviews and translations that occurredbe in publications such as mcsweep incentives, grand sweet, book forum and "the wall street journal" among ore places. he has had residencies at the mcdowell colony and the landon foundation. he teaches at the university of denver in their creative writing program where he edits the well-respected journal denver quarterly. hunt moved to rural indiana after a childhood spent in singapore where he was born and then to san francisco to the hague and on to london. he earned his bachelor's degree at indiana university. "kind one" seems to me to be an attempt to penetrate the misunderstandings, the corruptions, the mistranslations that slavery has wrought on this country. this story takes us back two

full centuries but puts us firmly in the present with its questioning of the limits of and the unrelenting need for empathy and morality. for its profound be assertion -- profound assertion that these things matter if we are truly to learn to live together with all of our differences, "kind one" by laird hunt is the recipient of the 2013 anisfield-wolf book award for fiction. [applause] ♪ ♪ >> thank you, dr. gates. it is such an honor to be here tonight and to receive this award in such amazing company. all of you, my fellow recipients

and my family, my father is here tonight, my sister is here tonight, my wife is here tonight. and my daughter, who's keeping my seat warm in the front row, is here tonight. [laughter] and a dear friend and longtime editor at coffeehouse press, chris fishbach is here as well. so i owe thanks to all of those people in particular. i'm going to, i'm going to read from the center of this book and give voice to the storyteller in the novel whose name is -- [inaudible] who is also held in bondage on this farm in kentucky. and he is one of the characters closest to my heart who speaks story into some very dark places. i hope this excerpt will glitter a little as well.

shine some light into the dark heart of this book. so this is the story of the onion. onion, he said. he held up the onion. then he went to the counter in the corner and took out the big knife sitting there and cut off its skin. when the onion was skinned, he lifted it up and gave it a good sniff. there was some flour and bacon fat and corn pone and chopped apple and stewed oyster at the ready. he took a little of each of these and set them in a line on the counter, then he picked up the onion again and turned to us. the onion slept with a cord attached to its ankle in the coal cellar unless the coal cellar already had company, and then he slept with a cord attached to his ankle in the

yard. in the yard it was the trees that spoke to him. one night the master came home with his face painted for the stage. the master lay about him until everything he struck had fallen. one did not rise and nebraska would again, and when the master woke from his rage, he wept. and before he had finished weeping, the onion was gone. the oyster shell he had cut his chord with he kept along with a piece of bacon, a pocket full of flower, two apples and a hunk of pone. he ran through the streets, his onion legs grew tired, so he took a bite of pone and made them strong. his onion arms and chest grew tired, so he took the oyster shell and cut the air in front of him and continued on. the city stretched before him. he ran toward the rising sun. a woman pepping water asked him why he was running so he took a bite of one apple and turned her into an apple tree. her child started to cry, so he took another bite and turned it

into a buzzing bee. the onion ran and he ran. near the outskirts a group of men set against him, so he broke off bits of the bacon and turned them into pigs. the pigs set into chasing after him, so he turned and cut at them with his shell. when they were killed, he lit a fire and set a pot to boil and hung them over it and scraped them one by one. then he butchered them and caught their fat in a cup. ..

they floated above the leaves. they had barely finished when his wife said here comes the men. the men carried torches. the adnan took a bite of its other apple and the earth split asunder. the heavens raged in its powder kegs were in a cataclysm ensued. your turn to water in the water to birth. a smash the trees. time burned. there was a howl of the winds. so the men came. he turned as white interest on the putter back in his pocket. he turned himself into a bottle of rolling and bouncing through the woods. it was dark at the end and could see its way by the light of the torches behind him. ever closer and never brighter come the trees imagine grew taller. they spoke to him. a door open and one of them and he went into it. inside to treat his sun was warm

and very soft grasses and a stream trickled by. they were sheep in a field of flowers dooming in fact these buzz between them. an old man smiled down at vietnam. you may stay here for 10 years, but must never ask for more. he sat back that right away. the name changed us all back into an onion import the stuff out of his pocket and made it into his voice again. we can live here for 10 years. yes she said. but the small house and planted a garden. they sat quietly together in the evenings. give it a soft blankets woven from cotton that grew wild in the hills. once you try to get one as she put it scampered away laughing so they ate that which they grew. by and by his wife and children one after the other. the children poke sticks in the stream complete in the fields and teams received. when the tennis almost a given crime onto one of the sheep had

run off with search of the man who told them they could stay. he wrote for weeks. once he thought he saw to what he saw called out to into that his family stayed. immediately the onion became used and could not find its way back to his house by the stream. his wife and children by the stream. beneath him if she died or disappeared. becoming dark is corrupt. it was hot in the hull of the tree were the onion was hiding in fat ran from his pocket. is apple's regard, his bacon was gone. he had no oyster shell. it flowers up with that. that night the admin side to the coal cellar with iron on a synchronous eyes shut for bruising. the next week the onion as follows road out of louisville in a procession. the onion mauriello constrained with the others to postmasters wagon. he wore chains and was given

nothing to me. [applause] ♪ >> beautiful. thank you so very much. each of the books being honored tonight teaches us about the ways in which families and communities survive, but do not always thrive under any number of damning pressures such as violence, dislocation, illness, radical differences and i didn't see it more. some of these families are formed by bonds of blood. others ran together at random. these random families are no less bound together than those bound by blood types.

in such a random coming together of people that kevin powers explores the brilliantly and so affect ainley. when it needs to recipient at the polk award for fiction. hector tovar in "the l.a. times" said the yellow birds quote might be the first american literary masterpiece produced by the iraq war. if we can put that in the face commonplace book into a few days, yellow birds might say it's a story of two soldiers. one, private john bartel survives the war. the other, private daniel murphy who doesn't. part of bartel was sure as private murphy's mother feel make sure the soldier comes home on the war allies. this is the promise of core city cannot and unfortunately does not keep. the story of what we might call forced family has noticed the immediate experience and this

haunting and perfect memory. benjamin percy in "the new york times" wrote the nonlinear design of powers novel is a beautifully brutal example of style matching content. war destroys the rates. the two divergent experiences. first, taking when he served in 2004 in 2005 at the u.s. army in tal afar in iraq. that can't sack him as mfa student poetry in the center at the university of texas in austin in the year 2012. but how could we understand world war i without the poetry of the soldiers riverboat, robert graves. in other words, ladies and gentlemen, we need poets to tell us the human cost of the war.

leave the statistics to politicians to social scientists, whose numbers become unfathomable after a point. how to tell a true war story if you're more a poet than a novelist. tautness given power to save. tell it as a phone. within one reviewers compared debut novel to kim o'bryan didn't say kerry. in my opinion the fictional depiction of the tragedy for the american involvement in vietnam and of course it's devastating cost. in that the outcome of explores worth endless contradictions with unifying colorways edify and was themeless pemba builds character to suit his character, but ultimately, inevitably destroys men, women and

children. we are not dealmaker to recognize the importance of this novel, set three. the guardian first book award, the price for first fiction and the american academy of arts and letters. and the free literary dewan or novel in translation. it was also a finalist for the national book award in fiction. dave eggers calls "the yellow birds" sat in an important way. the sadness comes directly out of what the author learned at iraq. he told the guardian in aye, one of the reasons i wrote this book was the idea that people kept saying, what was it like over there? seen as not an information-based and he can tenuous with a lot of information around. what people really wanted to know was what it felt like physically, emotionally and

psychologically. so that's why i wrote the novel. kevin powers tells us more than we can bear to know at times. this book is a reminder that the cost of ignorance is too often the water and bad peer for this powerful chronicle of life during wartime, the anisfield-wolf book award for fiction goes to set up to a substrate. caught that [applause] ♪ >> hello, thank you also much for taking an evening to come to this fantastic event. i'm so honored to be here coming to be recognized by an organization that believes this idea that the written word can have great meaning a great impact in our lives.

so to be here is really extraordinary. my wife couldn't be here, but i think she's watching on the internet. before i start, i'd like to say kelley, i love you. [inaudible] [laughter] thank you. [applause] the passage that i'm going to read from tonight takes place at narrator john bartel is recalling a battle in which their translator could be killed. the translator was killed in the middle of telling a story about violence garden. the larger purpose of this reflection, really what john bartlett was tried to do was sit through the through the wreckage of an offense and try to find a place where he can locate his own responsibility and i believe and i think he believes in doing that potomac can begin. the thank you very much. i'm going to start with a brief

introduction. doesn't count, does it, merv asked? no, i don't excel. what are we at come in at 68, 970? will have to check the paper when we get back. i was not surprised by the cruelty of my ambivalence then. nothing seemed more natural than someone getting killed. now as i reflect on how i felt and behaved as a boy of 21, my position of safety and they weren't having about the clear stream in the blue ridge, i can only tell myself that it was necessary. i needed to continue and to continue ahead to see a world with clear eyes, to focus on the essential. we only pay attention to vary things and death was not prayer. prayer was the bullet with your name on it. the ied. just for you. those were the things we watched were. i didn't think about malik much after that. he was an incidental figure who

only seem to exist in his relation to my continuing life. i couldn't have articulated it then, but i've been trained to think where was the great unifier that it brought people closer together than any other entity on earth. war is the great maker solstice. how are you going to save my life today? dying would be one way. if you die, becomes more likely i will not. you're nothing. that's the secret. a uniform in a sea of numbers, a number in a sea of dust. we somehow thought those numbers were a sign of our own insignificant. we thought if we remained ordinary, we would not die. we confuse correlation with cause and special significance in the portraits of the dead arranged neatly next to the number corresponding to their place on the growing list of casualties we read in the newspapers as indications.

we had a sense of something we only felt in the brief flash that these names had been on the list long before the dead had come to iraq. the names are there as the number given in place assigned. when we sought the names sergeant ivy quill vazquez 21 laredo texas number 748 killed by small arms fire in iraq, we were assured that he walk as it goes for throughout texas. we thought he was already got on the flight over, that if he was scared when they c-141 bringing him to iraq in the sky above bag dad had been no need. he had nothing to fear. he'd been in the boat, absolutely until the day he was not. the same two specialists remarry and jackson come in 1800

trenton, new jersey, number 91400 dead as a result of an sustained in a attack in samarra at the regional center. we were glad. not that she was killed, only that we were not. we hope she's been happy, but she took advantage of her special status report she inevitably arrived under the following wider how they got to hang her freshly washed uniform on the line behind her comics. of course we were wrong. our biggest error was thinking that it mattered what we thought. it seems absurd now that we saw each death is an affirmation of our lives, that each one of those debts belong to a time and therefore that time is not ours. we didn't know the list was limitless. we didn't think beyond a thousand. we never considered we could be among the walking dead as well.

i used to think maybe living under that contradiction had guided my actions and one decision made or on me and adherents of this philosophy could have put me on, kept me off. i know it isn't like that now. there were new bullets with my name on them were immersed for that matter. there were no bombs made just for us. any of them would've killed us just as well if they killed the owners of those names. we didn't have the time laid out for us or please. i've stopped wondering about those inches to the left and right of my head, the three miles an hour difference that would've put us directly over an ied. it never happened. i didn't die, merged it. although i wasn't there when i hop in, i believe unswervingly that would merv was killed, and a dirty knife to stab him more address to whom it makes concern. nothing made a special. not living, not dying, not even

being ordinary. still i'd like to think there is a ghost of compassion in me then. but if i'd had a chance to see those, i would've noticed them. my legs body crumpled and broken at the foot of the building didn't shock me. murph passed me a smoke in the day down beneath the wall again. but i could not stop thinking about a woman molex conversation had reminded me of, who served as t. small finely blemished cups. the memory seemed impossibly distant, buried in the dust, waiting for some rush to cover it. i remember how she blushed and mild and how impossible it was for her to not be beautiful despite her age, a few teeth gone brown interscan appearing at the cracked dry clay of summer. thank you very much.

[applause] ♪ >> thank you. if you're a frequent listener of npr, you heard the voice many times. call, even, timed, so very humane. this is the voice that it is everywhere apart from the tree. the recipient of this year's anisfield-wolf book award for nonfiction. in this massive unnecessary book, solomon writes about every family, by writing about family scrapping with challenges that most of us cannot even begin to imagine a race to challenges than most most than tonight he to imagine before reading this beautiful patient and affirming

both. writing about the complexity of families in which the child is different from the parent. solomon has given us a new and fuller idea about what difference and diversity can mean. i've spent the past several years professionally in the past several decades for only thinking about vertical identities. so that wasn't the term i apply to my recent genealogical studies. joined from solomon, jacob heller in his review from the new york boat economy through which the benefits have shared it. , empathy, insight, a sense of who you are can travel. a horizontal identity on the other hand is one where, and i quote, there's a rupture between the townsite and the parent six. sis. they seem to challenge many premises of family, he

continues, and interrupt the basic continuity that relationship resumes. the genealogy of african-americans if you think about it is replete historically with all sorts of ruptures between the child's life, for example in the parents experiences. imagine that first generation of slaves in this country. first generation to have arrived from africa to this new enslaved world. could there have been enraptured more profound? first-generation children born to those slaves would have known a world radically different from the one their parent could possibly hand down. still, shreds of cultural language and even movement made their way down and it is these vertical connections that so many of us spend time pursuing. with solomon does and "far from the tree" is creates world in

which horizontal identities come to dominate family life through the sheer force of their difference. dwight garner writing in the times called the diversity of the harrowing sort. that make signal is generated and the other types of diversity that we tend to celebrate. interest element connect interviews over a decade with more than 300 families accumulating 40,000 transcript pages. the volume of glowing reviews of this book may be about at that level as well. it's a rare the anisfield-wolf reviews in nature mag name. but the description of this nature editors pick that i quote, solomon debunks many clichés peddled by professionals from clinicians to caregivers. if you're just a scientist with no disabled person to look

after, this book will change your view of your own species. i'm not sure that parents magazine has made an appearance at the ceremony before either, but here it is. and i quote, this is one of the rare books that makes readers want to be better people, unquote. the usual suspects are here with julie myers in the times calling a quote or taking reading, a vivid and gripping account of who we are right now and what exactly happens when they try to make ourselves. "time" magazine puts it late with great oral histories. time has come a patient come brave, tramping, new ones. these are some of the adjectives used to describe this incredible book. i love the connivance of the guardian wrote about. he does so much read far from the tree as cohabit with it. it stories take up residence in your head and heart, messily unpack themselves refuse to

leave, unquote. the same could be said of our children. solomon makes us understand this messiness in new and quite riveting in intriguing ways. the distinctions aren't buy this book are too numerous to mention this evening, so i will choose a few. "far from the tree" has one of the critical work for nonfiction, anthony lucas to work from the columbia school of journalism, yields research advocacy award, humanitarian award and distinguished award in nonfiction of the national council on crime in the link would see about things. it was included on the 2012 best book list at "the new york times," publishers weekly, "boston globe," francisco chronicle, salon, amazon, the economist does be in the cleveland plain field. stallman is also received the society of biological

psychiatry's humanitarian award and behavior research foundation's project otherwise the word. his previous book, the new date even an atlas of depression when the 2001 national book award for nonfiction and was a finalist at the 2002 pulitzer prize. he's not only an award-winning writer, but also not a kid of writing and research himself having, solomon research fellowships in lgbt studies that mother yell. his others are the iron tower, soviet in the westbound in a novel called a stone vote. i am proud to say was traveled a similar educational path. undertook his masters degree in english at yell in 1985 was also an undergraduate and he was an undergraduate professor of english and took his masters degree i want that on my epitaph.

but unfortunately, that will never happen. [laughter] ladies and gentlemen, for relating stories that make us better people in showing us lives to widen our conception of what family and community can be, the anisfield-wolf book award is awarded to andrew solomon for "far from the tree: parents, children, an d the search for identity." [applause] ♪ >> i would like to thank someone does, my editor come in the agent and most of all my family and i would like to say that this award is kindly listed

various awards. this is such an unbelievable thrilling award to an for the history of the people want, for the other people waiting it tonight with me and for the extraordinarily distinguished panel of judges. it is a humbling honor. even in purely nonreligious terms, homosexuality represents a misuse of the faculty. this type of thick little secular substitute for reality, a pitiful sight from life and deserves no glamorization, no rationalization and above all, no pretense that it is anything but a pernicious sickness. that's "time" magazine in 1966 when i was three years old. in the last three years, but the president of the united states in supreme court have expressed their support for gay marriage.

[applause] i set out to write this book, determined to understand how that happened. how did an illness become an identity? and if that illness, my illness had become an identity for me ever so many other people who are living in this particular moment, what are the other illnesses that could become identities? what are the other identities that it can also be constructed as illnesses? out telling anecdote from when i was six years old or seven maybe. i'd come with my mother and brother to a shoe store in to get shoes and after the salesman had fitted as the family said scummy said my brother and i could each have a balloon. my brother wanted a red live and i wanted a people and. my mother said she thought i

really would rather have it palooka lynn. i said no, i really want the pink balloon. she reminded me that my favorite color was blue. [laughter] the fact that my favorite color now is blue, but i'm still gives you some evidence of both my mother's influence and its limit. [laughter] when i started working on the book, i was interested in the idea of love and i became interested in the idea that love and acceptance are not actually the same thing. it is my belief! spirits that most parents love their children. some don't. we'll read the stories of terrible abuse and neglect, but most parents actually do that their children. it takes some effort to accept your children. it takes some time to parse the complicated question of what you

want to try to change and improve through education, presenting a model, to expressing values come up for having a notion of what constitutes good health, mental and physical and what are the things about your children you need only to accept because they are not going to change and they are your children are. pursing outline is difficult. i won i started the book was a little angry at my family because they felt they had an accent did meet the second they learned more about who i was. as i interviewed these many, many families and accumulated these interviews, and the latest acceptance is a process and processes take time in my family had really done pretty well. i was looking at families with so many different kinds of difference and how families have struggled with them and how they come to terms with them and i found even for the families who seem most notably to a classification that relationships are not going to

developing process and they don't happen in an instant. having grown up when i did, i wasn't always proud. in fact, i was deeply ashamed at one point and i said to me when i was 12 that i was giving a speech. i would've been somewhere between shocked and horrified. pride took its time finding me and i was slow to find it. i didn't know what it was that might lie ahead for me. ..

>> having a child who's a prodigy is less sad than a child with disabilities, but it's not necessarily easier. i looked at families bringing up cheer conceived -- children conceived in rape. it had to do only with where that child came from. i looked at the families of people who committed crimes because i wanted to show that that experience of having a child who has done something horrifying and having to figure out a way to love that child is similar to the experience with disability, and i had a chapter on families of people who are transgender. and in each of these areas, i tried to look at the way the difference existed. and what i felt increasingly strongly as i worked on the book, as i moved from family to

family and from difference to difference, was that each of these kind of difference was quite isolating. there are only so many people who are transgender, there are only so many families dealing with crime, there are only a few musical prodigies dotted around, even conditions such an down's syndrome which occur more frequently affect a relatively small population. but if we allow ourselves to think that all of these families are negotiating an experience of difference, that all of these parents have given birth to children or acquired children in one way or another who are fundamentally different from them and that all of them are trying to figure out their way how -- out how to make their way through that difference, they're actually a broad and embracing community. a lot of the families i met talked about how much meaning they had found in having these children who were so different from them and having these children who were the opposite of what they had set out to do when they had children.

and lots of them said to me that, ultimately, they felt their bond with these children was even greater than it would have been with a child who was more ordinary. and even they were in awe of the resilience that those children found and the way that resilience inspired resilience in them. as the mother of one of the dwarfs i interviewed said when i asked her whose son who had a short life expectancy had instead turned into a charming and delightful young man who was finishing college, the first one in his family ever to go to college, i said what did you do that allowed him to emerge as who he is? and his mother said, what did we do? we loved him, that's all. clinton just always had that light in him, and we were lucky enough to be the first to see it there.

and at the beginning i wondered all the time, is the meaning really there? why do some people find the meaning and other people don't find the meaning? and one of the mothers i interviewed said to me for us it's not believe anything god that has given us that perspective, people always regale us with these little sayings like god doesn't give you any more than you can handle, and they can be very comforting. but for us, children like ours are not preordained as a gift. they're a gift because that's what we have chosen. i have a husband who was supposed to be here, but thunderstorms have kept imin new york. him in new york. he is the biological father of two children with some lesbian friends this minneapolis. i have a daughter with a college friend who had been divorced and wanted to have a family, and mother and daughter live in texas. and then my husband and i have a son who lives with us all the time of whom i am the biological

father, and our surrogate for the pregnancy was laura, the lesbian mother of john's two biological children. [laughter] [applause] and the day that that last child was born, the pediatrician at the hospital told us that he was behaving oddly in his first hours of life and that she thought he had a brain defect. and it was, it turned out that he didn't have a brain defect. what he had, in fact, was a cramp. [laughter] but we had some time of thinking that he had a brain defect, and i remember feeling at the time these two things, both of them so strongly and so immediately. one, that i wanted my child to be okay, i wanted it for him, and i wanted it for me as every parent time out of mind has wanted their children to be okay.

but i also knew that if he had some form of difference, that form of difference would become a locus of intimacy for us. it would be his identity of necessity, and if it was to be his identity, it would also be mind. this a-- mine. this award is particularly meaningful to me because it's an award that's predicated on the question of identity. these many kinds of diversity that i looked at, all of them are connected in one way or another to this idea of identity. and i feel that it was identity politics that rescued me from an elementive despair that was present in my earlier life. there has been a tendency much of the time for any group that achieves recognition to ally itself with the one that achieved recognition before and to distance itself from everything on the oh side of the -- other side of the ravine. there was a sense, certainly, that the gay rights movement of which i am a beneficiary followed in the footsteps of the civil rights movement, and there are a lot of gay people who talk

all the time about our indebtedness to dr. king and to the other people who brought about that transformation. i feel that debt myself and, therefore, to win something that is fondly called the black pulitzer has particular meaning for me. [laughter] [applause] but i also think it's important not only to reach toward the people who came before, but also to reach toward the people who will come after. and in meeting people in the disability rights movement, in meeting people in the transgender movement, in meeting people in the autism rights movement and so on and to forth, i -- so forth, i really felt that if there could be no rights for me until there were rights for african-americans, then there could be no rights for those people until my rights were there. and ultimately, my deepest belief coming out of this is that until we are all free, none of us is free. [applause]

and for that reason, i accept this award with utter pride and delight. my thanks to you. [applause] ♪ ♪ >> thank you, andrew. it's a singular honor to present this year's anisfield-wolf lifetime achievement award to my teacher, my friend, my hero, we'll suin coe. when she established these awards some 78 years ago, a commitment to social justice and

to shed light on these matters and to write as if one's life depended on it. he has. n. live -- he has, in fact, lived that compulsion for most all of his 80 years on earth. we'll soyinka became the first african to win the nobel prize for literature. his creative writing is as much about the human condition under all the various pressures of post-modernity about his political writings are about the challenges of development, modernity and democracy in a post-independent africa and especially in his native nigeria. in soyinka's plays are the sights through which he stages the universal drama of the human condition. in the same way that shakespeare wrote about one dilemma inherent in the human condition by situating one of his greatest

plays in the difficult choices facing a certain prince in denmark. it's, indeed, difficult to find exact analogs in the west for soyinka's public role in nigeria and throughout the continent. authors of plays, novels, poetry and essays, he's one of the most widely-read african writers both inside and outside the continent. he's also perceived as a force of the political arena with an unquestioned moral authority, a moral authority burnished by years of courageously speaking truths to power, as we say. and putting himself in harm's way his stature depends upon his remarkable ability to avoid confusing the realms of art and politics, all the while knowing that the two are inextricably intertwined and giving equal weight to both, but showing us that nonetheless, they are separate rhetorical forces with different artistic demands.

never does he attempt to force rhetoric to do the work of the imagination. if all politics is local, as tip o'neill wisely opined, then soyinka shows us as shakespeare did that all art, truly universal art, is local as well. and life among euro pa is the doorway through which he ushers us into sublime depictions of the weaknesses and the trailties of -- frailties of the human condition and to transcend those challenges of existence that together make us human. you might say that he's taken his motto from a line in hamlet, act three, scene two. the reaction to the word -- the action to the word, the word to the action. soyinka was born in 1934 in western nigeria. his father was headmaster of the

anglican mission school in his village, and it was here that soyinka received his earliest education. christian training in school unfolded in parallel with his lived experiences in traditional europa religious beliefs and cultural practices. he attended university college and then went on to the university of leads where he read tragedy with j. wilson knight, the foremost sake spear critic of his time, and with a preeminent marxist critic. he began his artistic ascent as a reader at london's royal court theater between 1957 and 1959 where the performance of his one-act play called "the invention" was the first of numerous performances of his work that would earn him a place alongside his fellow countryman on the international literary stage. acclaim for his work came early on. the british writer pe knellly

gilead wrote of soyinka in 1965, soyinka has done for our napping language what brigham dramatists from ireland have done for centuries, booted it awake, rifled its pockets and scattered the loot in the middle of next week. [laughter] the image of the artist is one that soyinka essentially embraced. he said, quote: i knew from childhood that independence in my country was inevitable. freedom, i felt, should be as normal as breathing or eating, and i was interested then in what kind of society we are going to have. when i saw what was happening, i found it difficult to be silent to the point of criminality. in 1965 soyinka was imprisoned for the first time for making a radio announcement, allegedly -- he's quick to point out he was never convicted -- [laughter] for making a radio announcement that mocked the resultings of the so-called election.

fellow writers in britain and america including william story and norman mail, lillian hellman protested, and soyinka was free, and the charges dismissed. 1967 soyinka was arrested again, this time accused of treason at the start of the nigerian civil war. ironically, just before his arrest he had met secretly with the secessionist leader to plead against secession from nigeria. for 27 months, ladies and gentlemen, wole soyinka was in prison including 22 months in solitary confinement. living under horrific conditions and constant threats to his life, deprived almost entirely of books, pens, paper he nonetheless wrote in secret whenever and on whatever he could. on scraps of paper secreted away, in margins of the scant books he was allowed, on toilet

paper. he nearly died more than once. but he survived. out of that experience came the book "the man died," what many have called an africa ya cause. the at of his -- account of his imprisonment contains what might be the most famous line he has written, and i quote: the man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny. soyinka emerged from prison even more firmly wedded to a belief in the capacity of the human will to structure and restructure the world, even a world that takes all possible steps to break that will. the primacy of the will and its strength even in the face of political forces that will attempt to dismantle or crush it attains no higher expression than in his play "death and the king's horseman." a thousand years from now people will still read this marvelous play. the play cajoles and

transfigures classical western drama into a literary form that is distinctly african. i cannot do jus can disto the play -- justice to the play here, so i will only say that it stages the conflict among ritual communal will and the political order that attempts to but cannot render it inactive. i would say crush it, but sometimes the political machine acts out of what it thinks are humane motives, pitting one idea of humanity against another idea of humanity. you'll just have to read the play itself. to give you just a sense of this masterpiece of the english language, let me share with you the lines that comprise one of the most beautiful passages in all of world literature. can you hear me at all? many your eyelids are glazed like a court san's. is it that you see the dark gloom in master of life? and will you see my father?

will you tell him that i stayed with you til the last? will my voice ring in your ears a while? will you remember even if music on the other side surpasses his mortal craft? will they know you ever there? have they eyes to gauge your worth? have they the heart to love you? will they know what thoroughbred prances toward them in comparisons of honor? if they do not, if anyone there cuts your yam with a small knife or pours your wine in a small call la bash, turn back and return to welcoming hands. if the world were not greater than the wishes of -- [inaudible] i would not let you go. soyinka's scholarly, civic and artistic honors are legion, and there's not much music in

listing them as in not as much music in listing them as in listening to his words. so i'll refrain from naming them except to say that this is not the first part-time wole soyinka has been recognized by the cleveland foundation. his beautiful autobiography of his early years received the anisfield-wolf book award for nonfiction back in 1983. it's with good reason that he comes back tonight. he once wrote, and i quote: books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth. soyinka's fight against tyranny of all sorts and his conviction that the written word is the most reliable and efficient weapon in this fight are, i believe, precisely what edith anisfield-wolf established these awards to honor. ladies and gentlemen, it's my greatest pleasure and my cherished privilege to present

the anisfield-wolf lifetime achievement award to my dear friend, wole soyinka. [applause] ♪ ♪ >> thank you. [applause] thank you very much. thank you. thank you and good evening. it is evening now, i think. [laughter] i must begin by thanking the foundation for being so patient with me, because i was supposed to be here last year, but i couldn't make it. and instead of just throwing me off the list, they decided to give me another chance. [laughter] this time i made sure that there

was no hitch whatsoever. the second statement which i'd like to make is to ask your permission to dedicate this award tonight to my late friend seamus -- [inaudible] who, for me, is -- let's just say he's one of my most favorite poets in world literature. he died just two weeks ago in nigeria and i think has been buried now. there was absolutely no time to bid him adieu, and a number of projects which, in fact, involved him had to be kept aside since he's no longer with us. so with your permission, i would like to dedicate this award to

him. [applause] yes, books. actually, as i came in this evening, i underwent a very strange and rather strong emotion. i say strange only because it was not a positive feeling, and everything about in this event, the history, the occasion itself, the companionship is a very positive one. and, in fact, what gave me this strange, strong, negative feeling was, in fact, a very positive statement, a positive revelation. which is not only related to an experience which i narrated in my book and what was it? a lady came up to me as i walked in and said i read your book,

your years of childhood, and i felt an affinity with it because exactly the same thing happened to me when i was about 5 years old. and so you actually began school at 3. well, my mother took me to school and tried to enroll me, and i was told, no, you have to come back the next year. she said, i was so def devastated. and i said, well, you see, my father was the headmaster of the school. [laughter] and the teacher involved was also a friend of the family. so i said, sorry. [laughter] now, but why did that, you know, bring back certain serious feelings?

i thought immediately of children like i was, like in this lady was -- like this lady was today if nigeria, for instance, who risk their lives to go to school. to learn to read. not just my part of the world, but the african con innocent and, of course, other countries, continents have been through it. some of them are still undergoing the same negative experience. afghanistan, pakistan, go into africa, somalia in which to go to school, to handle a book becomes a life and death event. right now in northern nigeria there are students, school pupil s -- not just students in

tertiary institutions, i'm talking about school children -- have been waylaid, their hands tied behind their backs, their throats slit for daring to go to school. you saw the image of ma la la, she's become the world symbol of this contest going on between barbarism, between darkness and light, between barbarism and a life meant which cuts across all stages, all ages. and when i came in then, we exchanged -- this lady and myself -- exchanged our experiences as children going to school without fear, enjoying the very smell of books, even those we couldn't read. just being among the instruments of education, of mind expansion. it just made me furious all over again. when a few decades ago an

egyptian novelist and nobel laureate was stabbed in the neck, i taught to myself at the -- i thought to myself at the time, no, that could never happen here in my country, in nigeria. well, it's been happening fast and furious. and, in fact, before i left nigeria after listening to ma la la addressing the united nations, i said to a few governor friends of mine, i said you must get a recording of that speech, that girl. i said this is a watershed many communication between youth, between children. so you must take them that. distribute it among schools. so that the school children here know that they're not alone, and that what they're undergoing has become a universal scourge which

has to be fought. what do the rebels, quote-unquote, what do they do? not internal ones, no, in mali. i'm talking about the invaders, the real invaders. what do they do the first day when they arrive in mali? they descended on the libraries. first it was the monuments. all artistic works, all works of creativity, all activities; music, etc., etc. but the most to symbolic and the most effective was their descent on centuries-old manuscripts to begin the work of destruction. but, of course, the malians themselves fought pack. the larger portion, a very, very vast portion of these books, these manuscripts -- some of them older than william shakespeare -- were saved. and, in fact, the process of restoration, of restoration and

creating permanent spaces for these libraries which are mostly kept families down generations, that work has begun. but the force of attackism can be so blind, so cruel and so focused as to make a beeline for the participants of human intelligence recognized in books. thisthis is something which has always baffled me. so the quotation my friend skipped this evening when i said books struck terror -- no wonder i made that statement. i was thinking of dictators in terms of these individual monostores and the kind of state -- monsters and the kind of state apparatus that they weave around them. actually hordes of humanity dedicated to extinguishing what is brightest and most

illuminating in human product. this is something which i must confess wrongs strictly -- belongs strictly, i suspect, in the field of psychiatry. because i think they're sick. they're sick, and they should be fought or else one way or the other immobilized n. -- immobil mobilized. [applause] i didn't mean to be solemn tonight, however. i just wanted to use that instance to express my appreciation for events like this on a general basis. it doesn't matter whether they are book fairs, wherever books become the podty of exchange, as exposed as the basis of humanity has become an obsession for me. if i can, i try to be there. and this award, which celebrates books, which brings writers

together with one another, with philosophers, philosophers with scientists, scientists with historians, researchers unearthing the treasure of humanity everywhere is, for me, one of the noblest undertakings that any organization can have. but i said i was not -- [applause] i said i was not going to be solemn, and i don't intend to be solemn. [laughter] what do the question i get asked most of the time is what do you do to relax? well, you know, writing and you're not being jailed -- [laughter] what do you do? and i said, well, i escape. i escape. escape where? well, doesn't matter. just escape. escaping to one's self, escaping to space, just escape. find spaces around yourself where you can recover what's

left of your sanity. sanity after taking -- [laughter] one of the escape experiences i had just a few years ago you can see the kind of fantasy which some of us writers engage in. escape activityies we start to undergo the experience of weightlessness in one of these nasa contraptions in san jose. and what i'm going to read tonight is just to invite you to join me in one of my territories of escape. it's a wonderful experience. you should try it sometime. i couldn't afford it, but i happened to belong to a certain organization, and i got a letter from them one day. the letter said we have a ticket on one of these, one of these space, you know, pseudo-spaceships. we'd like you to recommend

somebody to use the ticket. [laughter] so i sent a letter back saying, well, would a 70-year-old man in reasonable shape who's, you know, is willing to even do without wine for a week if -- [laughter] that would qualify, would that be acceptable? as a matter of fact, he said you're not talking about yourself, are you? [laughter] i said don't be stupid, of course i am. [laughter] and i'll just -- oh, yeah. the other reason i wanted to read from here is because the book to which skip referred was written decades ago, so i wanted to be sure that i still write from time to time. [laughter] so this turns to pass her gently

as she floated to her next neighbor. her body in suspended animation never came close, close to that dream of space. for i must tell you, i have known space through much else both incongruities and affinities, through solitude, found space even in hallucinations, not self or drug-inducted. e levitate in sleep, rise over parked cars, no, not as evel knievel on his motorbike or other deadly stance. no, i've drifted through bedroom windows, through walls, down staircases, vainly clutching banisters toward my disembodiment in silence so inpenetrable, not a sound emerged that i called for help. drifted over the edge of the

world. silence so huge and deep it made me think and dread the unthinkable, death by drowning in dry air. awake though steeped in sleep, immobilized yet torqued as wind-filled sails seeking past the rescue yet loathe to break the spell. earth is best. lodged, pressed to earth the forest floors, there is the paradox where closure is of closer green here nature opens ever inward, and the forest's cul-de-sacs deceive. they form serial chambers. entitlements, way stops. one steps over thresholds into chan sells of secretive silences, hives of confidentiality. most discreet, invisible.

not even the gun's intrusive order breaks a pact sealed since man learned to milk nature for his sustenance. the hunters breach -- and the forest eventually resumes its understanding. here is where all vanished languages of the world con convene -- convene. each tree is warehouse, cradle and grave of earth's beings. the gods keep guard on soundless narratives from time immemorial. you're welcome to the unspoken banquet. the guest whose trespass his own rite of initiation, the preside. -- gods preside. their 'em nations saturate the -- [inaudible] you're welcome to the banquet. thank you very much. [applause] ♪ ♪

[applause] >> thank you, skip. and thank you to our 2013 honorees. it is a privilege and joy to be with your words. i am karen long, as skip mentioned, manager of the anisfield-wolf book awards. this evening would not be possible without the support of the foundation's staff and our partners who are listed on the screen. we are grateful to all of you. to share video tonight with families and friends of this event, i urge you to go visit the an mysfield-wolf -- anisfield-wolf web site,

anisfield-wolf.org, and come back often. the site is a vibrant repository of history and up-to-the-minute news and art. you can find -- [inaudible] there now. after our authors receive their awards, please join us to cap off a stimulating evening with wine, hors d'oeuvres and a book sale in the lobby of the state theater. i have just one caveat; your winners and skip gates will be autographing their books. our authors can stay only a short while. now, it is time to present our honorees with their anisfield-wolf book awards. each writer will receive a monetary stipend and a glass

sculpture in the colors of his book jacket hand crafted by the artisans at streets of manhattan, a creative glass studio on east 33rd street in cleveland. we hope these unique works will remind them of our city for many years to come. please stand for a final round of applause as our writers receive their prizes. [applause] [applause]

[applause] >> this concludes our ceremony. please join us again in 2014. the cleveland foundation's centennial year. we look forward to seeing you then. good night. [applause]