I have dedicated the entirety of my time, resources, energy, and work over the last decade to poetry. I know that poetry radically changes our experiences of relation, self, and possibility. And I believe this work radiates deeply and importantly throughout our encounters with language and speech, even for those among us who may not identify consciously as writers, readers, or appreciators of poetry. I think despite all of its evident and continued conditions of precarity, poetry endures because it is essential, because it vitalizes us and provides us with the vision and material to reconstitute ourselves and our communities.

I write poems, I collaborate as a poet with other artists, and in my professional life I work to sustain many overlapping communities of poets, readers, artists, and scholars. I love this work deeply and unequivocally and would not choose another path. But the truth is that continued commitment to this work comes at great personal and material cost. Candidly—I feel it is important to say—I actively impoverish and indebt myself to do this work, and I certainly recognize I am not alone in that experience.

At a very practical and material level, this award from the National Endowment for the Arts makes it possible for me to continue the practice of poetry. It makes poetic vocation possible for me and for many others from a wider and truer breadth of experience. And I hope, in continuing this work, to help demonstrate and advocate for the wide-reaching import poetry does have. Ours is not a profitable enterprise. But perhaps in poetry we recognize there are meaningful pursuits outside conventional notions of value—that beyond our limited and myopic ideas of worth, there is language which might challenge, dignify, and shape us in new ways.