- [Promoter] Funding of the Ideastream Public Media production of the 87th Annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards was provided by the Cleveland Foundation.

(message pinging) - Each one of you will spend time every day with a teammate of a different race.

- [Henry] Social injustice takes far too many forms.

- Teach 'em, pale face brother, all about red man.

- [Henry] At times visible, at other times insidious, but always present and always poisonous.

The persecution of any identity perceived to be different is a threat to our fundamental social order.

- Ugh, what is that?

Gross.

- It's Chinese food.

My mom made it.

- Get it outta here.

- [Henry] So many innocent people have suffered under the weight of these hatreds.

The darkness of bigotry and intolerance seems to be never ending.

- It's called that if you see a Black guy driving anything but a burnt out Pento you better stop him, because he stole it law.

Yeah, I heard about that one.

(upbeat music) - [Henry] In a poem entitled, "My Dream For the World" 10-year-old Kite writes about her desire for a world in which this hatred can't hurt her.

Through child's clarity Kite uses language to find comfort.

- "My dream for the world", "To sprinkle helpfulness around my school, to tumble my way out of the dark, to paint the bad out of everything, to sketch peace onto the world, then rewrite something someone did wrong."

- She reminds us of the power of literature to push back against racism and intolerance in all of their heinous forms.

My name is Henry Louis Gates Jr. and it's my honor and my privilege to serve as the Chair of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Selection Committee.

Edith Anisfield-Wolf, a poet from Cleveland, Ohio, created this prize in 1935 to honor her family's passion for social justice.

For nearly nine decades, these awards have spotlighted writers whose work lifts up undertold and often buried stories.

And since the very first winner, these scholars, novelists and poets, have been a guiding light in the fight for tolerance and diversity.

I'm holding the book that received the very first Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.

(gentle jazz music) The year was 1935 when Harold Gosnell wrote this study of Black politics in Chicago, and this is what he said, "Unskilled laborers, domestic servants, prostitutes, clerical workers, bootleggers, teachers, mail carriers, Pullman porters, lawyers, physicians, clergymen, and others are all surrounded by a wall of prejudice erected by the white world."

In 1954, Langston Hughes won the Fiction prize for his story of the Black every man, Jess B. Semple.

In 1988, Tony Morrison was honored for her gripping account of an enslaved mother's love for her children.

In 2018, we honored N. Scott Momaday, the Dean of Native American Literature.

We continued to look to books like these to understand the forces of racism and division that continued to do us harm.

(upbeat jazz music) We honored these five authors at the annual Anisfield-Wolf Gala in Cleveland.

It's so good to be back with you here in Cleveland, one of my favorite cities in the world this evening.

So give it up to Cleveland.

(audience applauding) Thank you for sharing this time and this occasion, with our great authors and prize recipients.

Just ahead, we'll learn more about each of these writers whose words are on the front lines of the fight for freedom to be oneself.

Through the pens of our winners, we're reminded that the pain of hatred and intolerance can damage the roots even of our family history.

- To choose to love was actually an act of resistance to bondage.

- It haunts newcomers to a nation.

- If folks wanna exclude you, they will exclude you.

- It's a repetitive cycle.

- How people should connect the dots between police brutality and lynchings.

All they need to do is examine the histories of both of them.

- It's beyond just skin color.

- Why am I carrying this with me in this way?

How is this shaping how I'm interacting with romantic partners?

How is this shaping other kinds of relationships?

- And some, have spent an entire lifetime working against it.

- I think the mainstream media likes a Black point of view that doesn't offend their audience.

(upbeat jazz music) - We begin with the story of a simple cotton sack that carries the weight of the American slave trade within its worn threads.

Historian Tiya Miles is one of two Anisfield-Wolf nonfiction honorees this year.

For extraordinary examination of a seemingly simple family heirloom passed down through three generations of Black women.

Much of what we know about slavery comes from plantation inventory records that treated enslaved people as the equivalent of livestock.

In her book "All That She Carried", Miles rescues a young woman's story from erasure.

Imbuing it with the dignity and truth that the traditional historical record stole.

In so doing, she reveals how the African American story is really the American story.

(somber music) - A woman named Rose had been owned by a family in Charleston.

She had a child, a daughter named Ashley, and they were separated after their owner died.

This was an unfortunately very common occurrence that when an enslaver died enslaved people who were their legal property would be divided up and they could be sold.

Ashley was among them.

And at the point when Ashley was about to be sold, Rose, her mother, gave her the sack, which we now refer to as Ashley's Sack.

Now, this is a part of the story that we cannot piece together from the records, the part of the story that tells us what actually transpired between Rose, this mother, who was about to lose her beloved daughter, and Ashley, this little girl, who was about to be cast into what must have been her greatest fear being separated from her mother and sent into an unknown future with people who cared nothing about her.

(somber piano music) This piece of the story we only get from the sack itself, because a descendant of Rose and of Ashley named Ruth Middleton inscribed their story onto the surface of the sack with a needle and thread.

She sewed the story onto this material, thereby creating what we can read as a document.

It was the most moving artifact of the history of slavery that I had seen.

Most of the artifacts that we do see are, well, I mean, frankly, they're implements of abuse and torture.

I mean, we often see chains, we see shackles in museums, in images, and this was something entirely different created by enslaved people themselves, which was an artifact shaped out of love.

And at the center of the sack is the word Love.

Ruth Middleton sewed the word Love onto the sack with a large capital L. She wrote the line about love in red letters, making it stand out among all the other lines on that surface.

And that told me that love was critically important to these women, which makes perfect sense.

Because love was critically important to Black people, to enslaved Black people, who had enormous limitations placed on them when it came to how they could form their families and who they could love, and who they could stand up for, and who they could spend time with.

All these kinds of decisions that many of us may take for granted today, were withheld from enslaved people.

And so, to choose a love to choose to love was actually an act of resistance to bondage.

The sack emphasizes this and the sack became a blessing in a sense to Ashley from Rose, because it always carried a Black mother's love.

Like most Black people who had been enslaved, the women who packed the sack and passed it down didn't leave records that could be traced.

It was instead the people who owned them who left records.

And because of their purpose, those documents are incredibly cold and dehumanizing.

When they do include a name, it will just be a first name or a nickname.

Sometimes, and this is always incredibly painful to confront, these documents will include the ages of infants, the ages of small children, the ages of people who are so elderly that they cannot work and are therefore valued on these documents at $0.

And if we just allow the documents to pull us in, we will end up focusing on enslavers and not enslaved people.

Textiles and fabric were important, because of course the sack is a textile, it's made of cotton, and within the sack Rose packed a dress.

"'A tattered dress is a thousand things,' my friend who sews her own wardrobe told me when I shared the words stitched onto the sack with her.

I think we sense this to be true of our own aged dresses that morph into many meanings and then raised intimate ties.

A hope of happiness for the grandchild who marries in the same satin gown.

A parent's loving look of pride frozen into a pink tool tutu.

A slave mother's final embrace, arms outstretched then empty.

This dress belonging first to Rose and then to Ashley.

A fabric scar, a second skin, a shield.

It was a sign of women's lives frayed by slavery.

But nevertheless, respondent with beauty."

For an enslaved girl like Ashley, the one dress she had, the dress that Rose gave her, would have meant everything to her.

It would've been so important to her.

And even though today, many of us who are privileged might have a full closets of clothing, have many items that we can wear and that we can choose from, those items still tell something about us.

And it is those material items that could be read by historians in the future to understand us and our moment.

(cutter ripping) (sewing machine whirring) - My name is Regina Abernathy, I am the President of the African American Quilt & Doll Guild.

And we are quilters and doll makers.

One of the things that we do is we make sure our history is told.

Sometimes the world doesn't wanna know our history.

So, to put that history down in fabric is very important.

So, many people in this group they have family quilts with pictures and letters or words to explain who people were, when they were born, when they passed, and that's the type of thing that the African American Quilt & Doll Guild are doing.

We're trying to make sure history continues, to make sure family continues, to make sure you know your heritage.

- When I end the book with the words that nothing is immaterial, I am attempting to say that the history of enslaved people, the history of of enslaved women matters.

It is important.

It is a value of great value, not just to their descendants, not just to honor their memories, but also for our entire country.

(reverent jazz music) - Family ties are powerful, no more so than in the lives of immigrants and refugees who may arrive in their new homes with little else in their possession than their hopes and dreams.

Regardless of their places of origin, second generation Americans often share a number of similar experiences.

Just one example, and a bittersweet one, often they can't help but see how different their parents are from everybody else's parents, from American parents, while trying so hard to blend in themselves.

Unfortunately, xenophobia is also commonly experienced by too many second generation Americans.

As we learn in painful detail from the work of our second nonfiction award winner.

- Historian George Makari's parents moved from the country of Lebanon to the United States in the 1950s.

His book "Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia" delves into how that word was created and how it evolved to become a key factor in our understanding of world history.

(train rumbling) - My home is New York, but people don't really get to be buried in New York, you know, and so, I have always thought that I would be buried in a library.

(dramatic music) I think one of the very first, first editions that I bought is not really in the best shape because of that, but this book meant so much to me.

Look, I really loved Ellison and I loved his essays as well, because they're very much about how language can dictate how we think about other people.

So I was interested in finding a new topic and then I realized my own personal story as a child of immigrants.

And that part of my life is something I really haven't written about at all, but seemed like this story xenophobia was going to require me to really engage with that.

And so, I tried to...

This is my parents around the time they got married at the airport.

I was very lucky.

My folks had really good values.

(upbeat piano music) My parents were both from the same seaside village in Lebanon and their story is the story of western colonialism.

So my mother, 150 yards down the road from my father, went to all French schools.

Lebanon was a French mandate.

My father, 150 yards from the same village, went to all English schools.

In Lebanon, this is actually very common that both colonial cultures and Arabic are mixed up in the same sentence.

And so, it's very common for Lebanese to have a sentence where they say a word in French, a word in Arabic, and a word in English, and it's all in the same sentence.

I recently saw someone who had traveled to Lebanon and posted something on Facebook and she had written, "merci kteer buddy", and it is merci, thank you in French.

Kteer is Arabic for a lot, and then my pal.

I don't wanna claim that I suffered greatly.

I didn't.

But my parents came over to this country.

There was very much a sense of being outsiders.

There was very much a sense at times of not actually being accepted fully.

My father was a scientist and there were moments where it was kind of clear that partly he was being read not for his scientific work, but for his identity as someone from a country there's no way you could do something that big.

They never really felt like they were fully here.

They always talked about going back.

They always talked about what the Americans do.

(suspenseful music) My parents would have these flags that they would wave to say we belong here.

And my father had come here, because he had gotten a fellowship to go to Harvard.

And so my parents thought they had like this winning trump card that they could play that would say we belong here and it actually doesn't really work.

If folks wanna exclude you, they will exclude you.

"Every new day push them further from the sounds, smells and sights that in the beginning ordered their days.

I came to realize that they never truly left those environs where they first blinked reality into being.

Do any of us?

Instead, the days came with a low grinding loss of who they once were.

They talked incessantly of their imminent return.

At parties filled with baseball and business chit chat, my father would whisper, 'una ghareeb ma hal'alum' 'I am a stranger among these people.'

I thought I would become one too.

It didn't work out that way."

So I tried to go like, okay, I'm gonna tell you my story.

That's the subjective part of this and I want you to be able to think about it as you read what I wanna hope is the objective part of this, which is the history of this term and the history of ways of understanding it.

The word and the history of the word offer us a little bit of encouragement, which is to say at some point in the early 20th century people felt the need to name an irrational fear of strangers.

And that need then allowed for a kind of series of thinkers and of activists to claim that this was an ethical failure, a failure of tolerance, a failure of equality.

And so, this became now a term that could be used to recognize and do something about those problems.

But one of the things that I pitch is we also need a term that talks about these things as having common elements.

Because research shows that people who hate one group frequently are happy to hate another group.

And they hate the group that society throws up for them as the potential scapegoat.

(traffic bustling) - The Asian community is hurt right now.

We're being attacked in our own neighborhood.

What's up guys?

I'm Joe Mia, I'm born and raised in Brooklyn, New York.

My family's from, my grandparents actually, came from to Taishan.

Moved from Taishan to Chinatown in New York City in 1930s.

- [Reporter 1] Eight people murdered in roughly one hour.

Six of them Asian women.

- [Reporter 2] While people in Oakland's Chinatown are pleading for help after a recent spike in violent attacks like what you're seeing there.

- A 65-year-old Filipino American woman in New York City becomes one of the latest victims of the anti-Asian violence in the US.

(dramatic music) - So with the Asian hate crimes that's going on is that Asian people are being blamed for COVID and the pandemic.

And now Asian people are being targeted or they're attacking elderly, they're attacking women, they're pushing people, they're pushing Asian women on the train tracks.

A lot of Asian people are protesting and they wanna be heard because of the pain we're going through.

(protesters chanting) When I put out my social media or my Instagram or my TikTok, I'm bringing awareness.

I'm not knocking on any other race attacking any other race.

I'm not promoting anyone to do any violent activities.

I'm bringing awareness saying, we need to stop this.

Just sit back and see what we're going through right now.

It could happen to me, it could happen to any one of us, right?

I had a few friends who called me, hey listen, be careful.

How does that feel, your friends texting you saying, be careful get home safe, of being Asian, of being a race.

Just pay attention to what's happening to us.

- That Asians much less Chinese, should be attacked for what was a virus that emerged in their country -- that's the definition of a kind of xenophobic scapegoating.

That is the definition.

It's motivated by a sense from the top that this is what's going on here.

Scapegoats are offered up by communities.

Usually the individuals don't really pick 'em.

The dynamic of cooperation and building powerful, integrated, stratified societies, becomes what makes for a city like mine that has 8 million people of whom I know like couple hundred.

And we all seem to manage.

But if we can more and more understand that there are irrational forces that get in the way of recognizing, oh, that guy's not dangerous.

That person isn't a threat to me.

That's what we really can do something about.

(upbeat music) - A distrust of strangers and how such distrust brutalizes individuals and deforms communities is also at the heart of our 2022 Fiction prize winner.

Percival Everett in "The Trees" begins this story in Money, Mississippi, where two Black detectives are investigating a series of gruesome murders of white people.

Money, Mississippi is not an accidental locale.

That was the site of the lynching of Emmett Till.

At the scene of each crime is a second body.

A body that resembles Emmett Till as he appeared in the photograph that turned the tide of the civil rights movement.

That body appears, disappears and reappears as a shape-shifting symbol of the legacy of southern racial violence.

"The Trees" is the darkest of dark comedies.

A thriller, but with elements of magical realism that in fact look quite a bit like what we're used to seeing in too many citizen videos and news reports.

Everett yes, is a fiction writer, but the history of race relations in America has made what should be unimaginable, all too imaginable in this haunting novel.

(leaves rustling) - "The Trees" -- it's a story about lynching and mindless violence and killing, especially the killing of Black men in the United States.

(somber music) But it is as much about the idea of a culture coming to terms with its guilt.

♪ Southern trees ♪ ♪ Bare a strange fruit ♪ And "The Trees" is a reference of course to that wonderful song, that scary song, that horrible song.

♪ Black bodies swingin' ♪ ♪ In the Southern breeze ♪ ♪ Strange ♪ You can't undo what's been done, but one can fantasize about karma.

(somber trumpet music) Emmett Till's mother is one of the bravest figures in American history.

Just the act of having her son's casket open was not a brilliant piece of protesting, but the most honest and true tribute she could have paid to her son's life.

Emmett Till's mother showed the world her son.

I'm showing the world her son again.

Well, after the first scene, I actually turned to my wife and said, "You know, I'm not being very fair to white people in this novel."

And then I said, "Well, screw that.

That's the way it's gonna be."

It's essentially a how do you like it.

Growing up in this culture watching representations of African American people that persist that are not fair.

I just decided to turn the tables a little.

Carolyn Bryant is the white woman who claimed and later recanted that claim that she had been approached by young 14-year-old Emmett Till.

Told her husband and her brother-in-law who then went out and killed this young man.

She's in the book, because she's a part of that story, the Emmett Till story.

But I can't give her any more importance than that.

The important figure in that is Emmett.

I don't think about Carolyn Bryant, I don't care about her.

She means nothing except that she's a murderer.

(page rustling) In the book, I have a list of names that are a list of the victims of lynching in our culture.

"When I write the names they become real, not just statistics.

When I write the names, they become real again.

It's almost like they get a few more seconds here.

You know what I mean?

I would never be able to make up this many names.

The names have to be real.

They have to be real, don't they?

Mama Z put her hand to the side of Damon's face.

Why pencil?

When I'm done, I'm going to erase every name, set them free.

'Carry on child,' the old woman said.

Benjamin Thompson, John Parker, Joseph McCoy, Magruder Fletcher, Adam, Abraham Smith, Emmett Till, Anthony Crawford, Hung Qwan Chuen, Tom He Yew, Charles Wright, Claude Neal, Dick Rowland, Mar Tse Choy, Leo Lung Siang, Leo Frank, Mary Turner, Rueben Stacey, Sam Carter, Slab Pitts, Thomas Shipp, unknown male, Michael Donald, unknown male, unknown female, two adult men, James Byrd, Trayvon Martin, Laquan McDonald, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, Jonathan Hart, Maurice Granton."

And I didn't put every single name in, there's there are over 4,000 names that I found.

Although this experience is horrific and part of the cultural memory of African Americans, it's important to understand that America has attacked and isolated other peoples as well, Native American, Hispanic, Asian people.

To disregard that commonality would be to play into the American playbook of dividing people who want the same thing.

And like the character Damon in the novel, I did hand write all of them until my hand crammed and I kept going.

But it wasn't a cramping that was so meaningful, it was the sheer volume of people in the room with me.

(dramatic music) Police brutality is such a common occurrence in our culture that it's remarkable to me that it's not something that we consider every day.

And in considering how people should connect the dots between police brutality and lynchings, all they need to do is examine the histories of both of them, examine the demographics of the victims and the insane extremity of the attacks that have occurred.

When any number of these young men had been killed, my first thought is not that he could have been me that could have been my kid.

And I don't wish anyone to have that fear.

But white people don't have that fear.

- No justice!

- No Peace!

- No racist!

- Police!

- Black lives matter!

- Black lives matter!

- Black lives matter!

- Black people have been making choices that they don't wanna make for too damn long.

My name's Josiah Quarles and I want to put an end to police violence and make space for Black liberation in America.

It's really important that the movement sustains itself beyond like from one generation to the next, because this is not an overnight thing.

This didn't happen overnight.

It's not gonna be solved overnight.

We saw the outpour of people across the world around this issue, right?

When they had to sit in their homes and and watch it.

And that is a moment that is not a movement.

So it's important to continue that.

From the moment that Emmett Till's funeral was distributed out for the world to see it's been in a community of trying to stop what has been genocidal tendencies in this country.

And it's not relegated only to the police, but the amount of authority and the amount of lack of accountability within this institution, the power differential, it has to be constantly put in check and we have to have a reckoning.

♪ I can't breathe ♪ ♪ You've taken my life from me ♪ ♪ I can't breathe ♪ ♪ Will anyone fight for me ♪ - I was really impressed by this generation and I was asked to do interviews by a number of European newspapers, because for some reason they turn to Black artists to make comments on racial situations in United States.

And I didn't talk to them.

My response was, these young people are saying it better than I can.

It's their turn to speak.

- Another award winner confronting the brutality of the past is poet Donika Kelly.

The poet chronicles two emotionally fraught episodes in her life.

The abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of her father and the end of her first marriage.

In recounting these episodes, Kelly analyzes the violence and theft committed on her body, acknowledges her grief, and at times redacts the transcript that this book of poems creates.

Sometimes Kelly adheres to the formal structures of poetry, sometimes she disrupts them.

The renunciations manifests in its pages the powerful interaction between trauma and solace, between generational inheritance and self-creation.

(somber music) - I love this picture.

I love this dress.

I was mad though.

My mom gave this dress to my sister, and then what happened to it?

I grew up in LA, Compton.

I feel like this is a sort of peak LA picture.

Cousins, my mom's youngest brother and my sister and me.

And we moved to Arkansas when I was 13.

So I started writing poems somewhat seriously in high school.

However, serious high school kid can be about writing anything.

But when I got to college, so I went to Southern Arkansas University, home of the Mule Riders.

And it was a great experience and it was very supportive.

Both like my friends, but also the faculty were willing to like come to read.

They came to my readings, like a number of faculty members did.

So I was writing these poems.

I would enter the writing contests.

I would go to all the open mics.

(audience laughing) What 100 words permitted course corrections.

"Are they real", she asked, "at least we're all here."

(audience applauding) Look, people clapping, so nice.

"The Renunciations" is a poetry collection wherein the speaker is going through a divorce, end of the marriage.

And she is also dealing with memories of childhood sexual abuse.

And there's a way that those two concerns intersect with each other.

The poems weren't the place of saying this happened to me, but rather, how is this sitting at the center of my life?

And like, why am I carrying this with me in this way?

How is this shaping how I'm interacting with romantic partners?

How is this shaping other kinds of relationships?

How is this shaping how I think about myself?

There's a figure in "The Renunciations" called the Oracle.

My knowledge of Greek mythology comes from this really great beautiful book that I read in the fourth grade called "D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths".

They were all of these stories about kings going to the oracle at Delphi and the oracle would say, well, your child is going to kill you.

And so, the kings would invariably just like try to like murder their children.

You know, so that they could remain in power and alive, but their very actions created the circumstances under which their children or grandchildren then killed them.

And I thought that was wild.

I remember reading that as a kid and just being like, well, you can't escape fate.

In my family, we say this thing sometimes where it's like it's gonna be what it is, which seems like very fatalistic.

It's like, whatever it is, that's what it's gonna be.

So, how do we deal with that?

And I feel like the Oracle does some of that work.

The Oracle in this book really handles the sort more sensitive historical narratives of what the speaker experience, what the speaker's father experience, what the speaker's mother experience.

And I needed a little bit of distance on that.

And so that figure, that persona, sort of gives me a little bit of hiding room in order to deal with some of that more sensitive material.

I was in a workshop with the poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi, and they'd given us an assignment to do some redactions.

To do some blackout poetry.

Blackout poetry or erasure or redactions, it's a kind of found poetry.

So you take a document that already exists and you find on the page a poem.

What I found, they feel almost like aphorisms.

They sort of like, please don't forget your wife.

I was like, oh, I didn't know that was in there.

And I thought, well, that's neat.

And then when I put the book together, I was like, wait a minute, I have these things, so let me see if they will work.

And what I love about them and what I appreciate about them is they do signal that there are things that the reader does not have access to.

Even though the book is so intimate that there's been a lot of care and choice made in how the book and the poems are put together.

And it's not a diary, it's not the raw material.

It's something that has been shaped into art.

(somber music) Melissa Febos is wonderful.

Our life together is warm and it is kind and it is stable and it is not built on hierarchy.

Like there's no sense of competition, which I think actually is kind of amazing.

Part of that is we're in different genres.

Like she writes nonfiction and I write poetry, and so we're just like in our lanes and it's just really supportive.

(somber music continues) I've had people reach out and ask if they can talk about their experiences.

And I tell them that I'm not the best person for that.

That I'm glad that they wanna talk, that they feel ready to share, but that I'm just like another survivor alongside them.

Like I'm not an expert or a psychologist, but I'm really grateful that the work helps them feel less alone.

And that was maybe the scariest part of the publication process.

Not writing the poems, but like thinking about them being published.

I was like, people are gonna wanna talk to me about their experiences and I've just got a handle on mine.

But I think that that is the power of poetry and the power of literature is we can feel so close to someone even if we don't know them.

That the work brings us closer to each other and that feels important.

- My name is Bridgette Lewis.

Here at the LGBT Community Center of Greater Cleveland, we believe in the power of literature in writing as healing as therapy.

And I think one of the reasons that we believe that so wholeheartedly is because of our own experiences.

So I noticed in Donika's work, a lot of it was about her father.

And I said to myself, wow, maybe it's not about my father, but I have a lot of those same connections, those same feelings in regard to my mother.

And when I saw Donika in reading her work, one of the things that she said when she was reading was at some point I just had to accept that my father was never gonna change.

And one of the most life changing things that I've learned is I had to accept that some of my family members are not gonna change.

Reading her work and hearing her say that, let me kind of let go of that myself.

(somber music) - "The moon rose over the bay.

I had a lot of feelings.

The home I've been making inside myself started with a razing, a brush clearing, the thorn and nettle, the blackberry bush falling under the bush hog.

Then I rested a cycle fallow.

Said Winter.

Said the ground.

Is too cold to break, pony.

Said I almost set fire to it all, lit a match, watched it ghost in the wind.

Came the thaw, came the melting snow pack, the flooded river, New ground water, the well risen.

I stood in the mud field and called it a pasture.

Stood with a needle in my mouth and called it a song.

Everything rushed past my small ears were in the leaves were in the wing and the wood about time to get a hammer I thought.

About time to get a nail and saw."

- Now a few words about our lifetime achievement honoree, who has fundamentally transformed the generic shape of African American literature.

Over the course of more than a half century, Ishmael Reed has produced a staggering amount of work as a novelist, a poet, a playwright, an essayist, even as a musician.

He's best known as a satirist and social critic who's guiding principle has always been writing is fighting.

No one is safe from the trenching insights of this prolific thinker.

Over the years, he's cast his keen eye on a wide variety of targets, including among many others, art museums, gentrification, the Broadway phenomenon, Hamilton.

- The way I look at a man like Hamilton, who thought human beings as property.

- And dogma and doctrine in all of their many forms.

Ishmael Reed seems to see his task as keeping all of us honest.

And thank goodness for that.

(typewriter clicking) Your fearless creativity, your multi-genre transformations and your refusal to suffer fools gladly or otherwise, has guided us and changed us.

(somber music) - Well, I started out reading fairy tales.

I'd get them from the library and secondhand bookstore.

It take my mind away from my condition.

We were living in the projects that's pretty grim life.

There's very little privacy.

We learn very early that we were living under different laws because, for example, the Fourth Amendment, I mean, the police would break into people's homes in the projects anytime they felt like it.

(somber music continues) My stepfather had a good job at a light manufacturing place, a good salary.

My mother was the business person.

She knew the credit system, no will call, all those things.

They were able to accumulate capital.

Then they moved out to Cold Springs, which is the scene of that massacre at the supermarket there.

(somber music continues) That was a place like that was a middle class stopover for Black American strivers.

I attended a school that was located down the street where we were required to wear a shirt and tie.

There was a guy named Dave Sharp, who's an Irish American writer who encouraged my talents.

Irish American poet, lived in Buffalo.

And he said, well, you ought to go to New York to be a writer.

So, he invited me to go down one weekend.

(upbeat jazz music) We attended a gallery on 10th Street.

That's the first time I met Carla.

(mellow jazz music) She was at the height of her career.

She choreographed for Meredith Monk and all those people.

- You know, that time the art world of New York was very much centered in the downtown.

There was maybe 300 or 400 people was the sum total of all the artists and everybody went to each other's work.

And within that society, so to speak, was where Ishmael's path and my path crossed.

- Well, we worked on, we collaborated on something called Black by Aldo Tambellini.

- Well, there were more likely fights going on at the back of the forum for collaborating artists.

We would be in all those lofts figuring things out.

Some of my improvisations were done with Ishmael's poetry.

Well, projections of all those were on the screen.

I don't know how to express it.

It was just a friendship that developed.

We had both been in different relationships and they had both ended somehow.

We started connecting as a couple.

- But at that point in the sixties and early seventies, the editors who took chances were still in charge.

That's before the salesman came in, in the late seventies And so at Doubleday I got three books that everybody considered experimental.

"The Pallbearers", "Yellow Back Radio Book Down" and "Mumbo Jumbo".

So I got them to publish three books that would not sell.

Really, I mean, they were not meant for the market.

- I grew up as a member of the Black middle class.

But when I went to the bookstore, the novels about my people were either set in the inner city or the rural south, often antebellum.

So where was I in this literature?

And then I discovered Ishmael Reed.

- I'm thinking of a class I took in college and we read "Mumbo Jumbo".

I was like, what is this?

I just like, it was unlike anything that I had read before.

(upbeat jazz music) - "On the table lies a Nimba mask made of Guinea wood they seized from a private collection belonging to a society woman on Park Avenue.

Tam, a Nigerian musician and writer, will return 5,000 masks and wood sculpture to Africa.

He and his aide's posing as innocuous exchange students, had repatriated masks and figures carried to Europe as booty from Nigeria, Gold Coast, Upper Volta and the Ivory Coast.

rom where they were exhibited in pirate dens called museums located in Zurich, Florence, England, and in a private collection in Milan."

(upbeat jazz music continues) All the reasons that I left New York was because I grew up in Buffalo and I was always suspicious of people who were flattering me.

I said, if I remain in New York I would've died of an overdose of affection.

(Ishmael laughing) Yes, I left New York, which just has too many distractions.

And I have space out here and anonymity.

- He's very quiet, you know.

Actually most of the time he's so focused on work.

He's just always working.

And as long as he's allowed to do what he wants to do, he's fine.

- [Speaker] It's just blues.

- So you just won't do that.

(indistinct) - Yeah, Negro Spiritual.

- The idea of operating for multiple genres, including playing jazz, it's enjoyable, but it's another way of storytelling for me.

(gentle piano music) When I was 60 years old, I said, I'm gonna try my hand at this.

And that's when I buckled down and start studying jazz.

And that knowledge of jazz that I've acquired has helped my portrait.

But the blues is the foundation of jazz.

I think it's up to the old people to keep blues alive.

And I'm gonna do as much as I can to contribute to that by recording some of these older musicians.

(upbeat jazz music) (upbeat jazz music continues) I think the mainstream media likes, prefers Blacks who are toned down.

They're always asking me, do you have hope?

They like a Black point of view that doesn't offend their audience.

Muhammad Ali got a contract with Random House.

And so at the press conference, they asked him, how do you think you'll be successful in writing?

He said, "Writing is fighting."

So I didn't coin that though people attribute that to me so I picked it up.

(upbeat jazz music) - From a study of racial politics in 1930s Chicago up through modern views on xenophobia, lynching and same sex relationships, division and divisiveness have been a powerful fuel for scholarly research in literary storytelling.

We've relied on literary lights of yesterday and today to confront the issues that divide us.

And rest assured the novelist, scholars and poets of tomorrow are dreaming of a better world and using their language to find a way out of racism, division and hatred.

- While the day comes, I'll create fun.

While the night comes, I'll rewrite the stars to constellations to kick away bullying, to splash nice comments, to rise goodness, to stop pollution, to clean my neighborhood and city, to clean wars that happened before, to reunite family and friends.

This is my dream.

(audience applauding) (gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (dramatic music) - [Promoter] Funding of the Ideastream Public Media Production of the 87th annual Anis-Field Wolf Book Awards was provided by the Cleveland Foundation.