When the news reached me in August that Senator Kamala Harris had been selected as Joe Biden’s running mate, it struck me that the Democratic Party was ready to listen—and to learn. These things will demand something of each of us. One call is for institutions and communities to do more to hear and heed the perspectives of Black people and people of color in their midst. The purpose of literature, religious and otherwise, is to help us interpret change within a structure. A native of my home state, born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, who then grew up in my new home region, in Northern California, Smith is the author of three works of verse and one work of narrative non-fiction, an evocative memoir about her mother. But we do have control over how we respond to the world. His mind is on the future. Share this: Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window) Click to share on … The anthology includes contributions by former poets laureate Natasha Trethewey and Charles Wright and will be used by Smith for her visits around the country. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her second book of poetry, Life on Mars, which I’ve carried in my bag every day since 2012 and given as a gift to at least five friends, two in a state of grief, as the book is very much about her memory of her father. It makes sense that Smith named her daily poetry podcast The Slowdown; like the natural world, she calls us to silence and a slower pace. our own new limbs, One year before the inauguration is a good time as any for each of us to ask: How are you calling yourself forward? I feel the thrill of community coalescing around a powerful voice calling for change. Even with these things achieved we will struggle with forces within and without. “There are times when we are overwhelmed by sudden calamity, natural or manmade,” he said in a eulogy for five fallen police officers in Dallas that year. Joe Biden’s running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, is a symbol of hope and healing for millions of Americans. The grass bends We need directives to turn away from aggression and towards an open-heart, to help heal the wounded and tend to the widow instead of wallowing in our own resentments. We cover it up with actions to order our lives and avoid the deeper roots of what’s going on. One of the jobs of a good leader in the United States is to lift up the whole and never denigrate or make vulnerable any of its parts. This winter, I wish the whole country could stop and ask what we can give back. She has also edited … His rhetoric is right (and also deeply Christian): it is impossible to turn back towards one another in service without first recognizing that each of us has suffered and marches forward imperfect. And what is our defense against fear? Kids … “All of us, we make mistakes. ... United States of Writing is an initiative to expand our core programs to better serve writers coast to coast. Just like Kind of Blue. In it she curates letters that enslaved black Americans wrote to President Lincoln and his government, expressing their faith in the cause of the war and in sacrifice for the greater good. But what if, after time passes, you don’t stand in quite the way you want? These are the capacities we need in our particular moment in human history. We need a way out of this surreal, civil strife. Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window), Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window), Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window), Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window), Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window). She has published four books of poetry and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for “Life on Mars.”, Connect with the definitive source for global and local news. If there’s anything we have learned from the last decade of American public life it is that good leaders matter in calling us to this inquiry—but their surety is anything but certain. Smith said in a statement that she valued poetry as a way to expose people to different voices and perspectives. then learns to stand again. Like Virgil accompanying Dante through the gates of hell, we turn to resolute voices to help us find our way because we need them. We are in winter, roughly a year before the inauguration. Tracy K. Smith writes what we know, only bigger. I’m talking about how we set our expectations as individuals. As a young woman growing up in California, Tracy K. Smith learned from her parents that “we owe something larger than ourselves” to the world. These are the capacities by which nations not only survive but become stronger, wiser, and more just. Tracy K. Smith: Growing up, I loved the feelings I would get from reading poems in and outside of school. We are not in a state of declared civil war, however, but a fierce and precarious fight for our identity, for a pattern of following “the better angels of our nature,” in Lincoln’s words from three years earlier. our own new limbs, As Attorney General of California, Harris secured a $20 billion settlement for California homeowners faced with predatory lending. He has a litany of specific demands, “to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” He focuses his listener not on those who fought, but on their widows and children, the most vulnerable that have been abandoned and left behind.

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