In a year that has been so damaging, disheartening, and exhausting for so many of us, to be seen by my community, by writers I admire, is huge. I am honored to receive this level of acknowledgment and encouragement for my work. It is indeed a fellowship that I have entered into in the truest sense. It is a deepening of an already present kinship with other lovers of language. In an artist statement for a recent publication, I said that I write to push back against the monster language has tried to make of me. That pushing back is the work of unraveling language from its colonial tethers and its etymological constraints. It is the time spent within the words, the disruptions as well as the moments of acquiescence. Writing poems, for me, has always been a way of softening to the world and to myself, of being gentle with my rage and my grief, of holding space for others, of remembering as a collective act, of remembering to breathe. The National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship will help me create space and time to extend that breath. For this, I am truly grateful.