From The Los Angeles Times, Nov. 15, 2023:

National Book Award finalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rita Dove was honored with the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. "The poet is called upon to use words like stepping stones to carry herself and her readers across that unarticulated turbulence, the unwarranted depths within us," Dove said while accepting her award. "Granted, that's pretty frightening stuff, which may be why many people are wary of poetry, afraid they won't understand it the right way."

"In today's endangered intellectual climate, my cynical self might say that it's why the woefully growing list of censored and banned books in American schools and libraries includes relatively little poetry. Unless that commercial success breaks the ears of those reactionary book burners, who rather than risk being asked to explain what exactly it is that strikes them as dangerous in our stances, have left us to our corner of the sky hoping that no one can hear us above their shouts. But we keep on strumming our harps."

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Rita Dove received the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters as only the fourth poet in the cross-genre lifetime achievement category's history, joining Gwendolyn Brooks (1994), Adrienne Rich (2006) and John Ashbery (2011). Her acceptance speech as well as LaVar Burton's and Jericho Brown's introductions can be watched and heard here.