On June 3, 2025, Alane Salierno Mason delivered these remarks at the 2025 Ottaway Award Ceremony on behalf of Tom Sleigh, who was unable to attend.

It’s difficult to know how to praise a writer who has already been knighted by the French government; whose work has been translated into forty languages; who has published seven books of poems and six books of nonfiction; and has edited or translated some twenty or so additional volumes. His list of awards from here and abroad are as long as both my arms: awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Ingram Merrill Foundation (no relation), the Slovenian Ministry of Culture, a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, the Bosnia-Herzegovina Annual Literary Award, the Bosnian Stecak, the Kostas Kyriazis International Literary Prize, and so on and so forth.

On top of this, as a journalist he covered the war in the Balkans, where he was pinned down behind a tree by a sniper, among many other close calls; he served as a coach for a college soccer team, as well as being a star midfielder in college himself—and of course he’s written a book about soccer. He worked in a plant nursery, which forms part of his mordant, tough-minded, and elegiac memoir: its originality and selflessness defy the usual conventions of the form by putting other people and his relationships with them at the center of Self-Portrait with Dogwood.         

And when he’s not writing or being knighted or thinking about dogwood trees, he directs the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Each year he brings thirty or so well-known writers from all over the globe to reside for a semester at the university in order to write, meet each other, and engage in cultural exchange—which means hanging out and reading each other’s work and talking and joking and seeing each other not only as writers, but in Yeats’s phrase, “that bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast.”

When, you might ask, does he sleep? And the answer would be on airplanes—because in addition to all this, he also shepherds American writers to cross-cultural exchanges in over fifty countries—which works out to more than a quarter of the countries in the entire world. I mention this to give you a clear sense of Merrill’s many talents. This may sound extreme, but there is no one in the world today who has done more than Chris to create what Seamus Heaney once said was Osip Mandelstam’s goal: to “make the steadfastness of speech articulation” a global spiritual endeavor that involves all humankind. In Merrill’s view, literature is its own independent category of consciousness, and it presents a counter-reality that is equal to, but also surpasses, the conditions that give rise to it.

Given the breadth of his passions and engagements, is it any wonder, then, that I met Merrill, who was already something of a legendary figure to me, not in the US but in Lebanon and Syria? And then I had the great good luck to travel with him in east Africa to Dadaab, the largest refugee camp in the world, and then to travel with him to Iraq—a country he’s visited many times: in fact, he was instrumental in aiding Iraqi writers to get Baghdad named in 2015 a UNESCO City of Literature. And when he’s not overseas, he’s here at home, helping to foster the literary arts by serving on the National Council on the Humanities, to which he was appointed by President Obama.  

Of a piece with his advocacy for literature worldwide is his own work. In his book of prose poems, After the Fact: Scripts and Postscripts, that he wrote as a dialogue with the poet Marvin Bell, you’re privileged to witness an allusive, shrewd, brilliantly analytical intelligence, one passionately committed to world humanism but also profoundly skeptical of it—especially given the atrocities and blood that he’s reported on and witnessed firsthand. These are some of the most original poems that I’ve read in a very long time. They have a slightly fabulist cast, a Kafkaesque sense that inside everyone an inner cockroach is waiting to come out—an eerie, but deeply human recognition in which yes, even the cockroach has an inner life and feelings, and deserves to be thought about in language that is precise in its descriptive powers and moves easily and swiftly from imagistic to cultural to political to spiritual associations. 

His ability to construct a compressed narrative in which the history of Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya is refracted through the life of a single Libyan poet who was on Gaddafi’s kill list—at least until Gaddafi himself was killed—brings into stark relief the historical ironies and potentialities of not only one man, but his entire country. In poem after poem, Merrill shows what it means, not to bear witness to history—whatever that lofty-sounding phrase means—but to write from the ground up just how a bullet casing looks; or how his Libyan friend insists that Gaddafi’s son will be treated humanely—at least until he’s hanged; and how there’s a list of other things beyond the kill list that the reprieved Libyan poet has to show his poet visitor.         

No one in America writes with more authority and from more deeply inside what it actually means to reside in a global community—a community that has almost nothing to do with hectoring, large-scale, all-caps Ideas like Freedom, Jihad, the Global Marketplace, MAGA—and everything to do with moments of such irony and affection and humor and horror all mixed up together that any attempt to reduce his sense of the world to an orotund summation would be a violation of his work’s complexity.

Back in January, Chris and I traveled to Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, places where Chris—of course—has been before. As part of our travels, we went to a small mountain city called Taif and visited, among other places, a rosewater factory. We were welcomed by an older gentleman who sang to us a traditional Bedouin greeting while showering us with handfuls of rose petals. There was something more than a little hallucinatory about it, as if time had skewed into another century, either deep into the past or far into the future. The rose petals landed on our shoulders and in our hair before fluttering to the concrete factory floor, which took on the look of a rose garden, utility turning to wonder even as the petals grazing our skin had a faintly ammoniac smell, as of something fresh on the verge of turning rotten. Chris and I have traveled together many times, and there’s always a moment like this one, a moment of such unlikelihood that, for all the strange things Chris has seen, you know he’s never seen anything quite like this. That’s when he shifts from being the consummate cultural diplomat to the acute observer of his poetry and prose. And because he’s seen more of the world than anyone I’ve ever known, he achieves what Czesław Miłosz once called “the general human perspective,” in which the narrow affiliations of blood and country fall away precisely because the details of his impressions are so beautifully embodied on the page. He’s like a latter-day Herodotus, interested in everything, dismissive of nothing, always ready to credit marvels, but wary, hardheaded, and self-skeptical—all qualities that as a writer and a person I’ve tried to emulate as best I can.

But back in the spring of 2007, when we first met—not, as I mentioned earlier, in the US, but in Lebanon—I knew little of such habits of attention, at least as they applied to journalism. In Beirut a mini civil war had broken out, car bombs and assassinations crescendoing to a full-scale siege by the Lebanese Army of a refugee camp, in which Chris came close to being shot by an overzealous Lebanese Army officer. But forget the big boffo “I’ve-stared-into-the-eyes-of-death-and-never-blinked” stuff. I noticed that he was taking notes even when nothing of much interest, at least in my unobservant eyes, seemed to be going on. I’d been asked to write something about the trip, and although I had a pen and notebook, it was my first time as a journalist, and I had no idea what I was supposed to be writing down. So when I asked Chris what I should be doing, he shrugged: “Tom, nobody’s interested in your feelings. Instead, just jot down a few details of whatever’s actually going on so that you can recall it in detail when you’re back home.” Not punditry, not opinion-mongering, just, in Seamus Heaney’s phrase, “the music of what happens.” A music that can’t be faked, at least if you’re interested in a rose the way Chris is, not for its symbolic “rosiness,” but for the slippery, slightly nauseating smell of rose petals mashed underfoot.

All of which is to say that Chris’s vision is unique in American letters. One of his great triumphs as a writer is that he’s refused to allow his work to be balkanized by Politics, History, and Atrocity, while it nonetheless partakes of them. He possesses what the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert possessed: a sense of personal and historical irony so fine that no abstraction can violate it. His work embodies what the Chinese ideogram for integrity is supposed to pictorially represent: the figure of a man standing next to a mouth—that is, a man literally standing by his word.