I wish to thank my friend Tom Sleigh, who is not only an extraordinary poet and essayist but the best possible travel companion, especially to places that are, shall we say, less than safe. Thank you, too, to Alane Salierno Mason, Dedi Felman, and Samantha Schnee, the founders of Words Without Borders, which is an indispensable source of international literature, as well as Lissie Jaquette; Nina Perrotta; Zaporah Price; my old friend, Susan Harris; and Jim Ottaway, Jr., for whom this award is named. I confess that when Lissie informed me that I was the 2025 recipient I deemed it a sort of consolation prize for what a retired diplomat friend refers to as the “perverse honor” I have of directing one of the first State Department programs terminated by the Trump administration, which effectively dissolved a partnership with the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs dating back to the 1960s. Cultural diplomacy, the exchange of information and ideas, is what I have practiced for the last twenty-five years at the helm of the International Writing Program (IWP), and it is strange for me to no longer be in daily contact with our program officer in Washington, who is also a cherished friend. But gratitude is what I feel tonight for Words Without Borders and Mr. Ottaway, my staff, civil servants in Washington, foreign service officers and local staff at US embassies and consulates, all the poets and writers who have graced the IWP with their presence in Iowa, and all they have left behind, on the page and in memory. Perhaps it will be useful in these remarks to give you a sense of what we lose when we turn our backs on the world, trading soft or smart power initiatives for the greed and bluster of a tyrant.

The news of our termination arrived on the same day that Elon Musk and his DOGE henchmen canceled 5,200 USAID contracts and fired or placed on administrative leave most of that agency’s employees, dismantling a relatively inexpensive means of combating global health challenges, from dispensing HIV/AIDS medications and mosquito nets to providing support to communities affected by natural disasters. These cuts to spending on American humanitarian programs, which will likely cause the deaths of millions of children over the next five years and which have already cost the lives of 300,000 children, according to a recent estimate, prompted Bill Gates to remark that “the world’s richest man has been involved in the deaths of the world’s poorest children.” Who knew that America First could be so lethal? Musk has left the capital, but the damage remains.

The gifts of time, space, and camaraderie the IWP has offered to more than 1,600 distinguished poets and writers from 160 countries including three future Nobel laureates are as nothing compared to the lifesaving measures and support for democratic processes, sustainable economic development, and protection of the environment that USAID has provided to communities around the world. But the connections forged by the IWP between writers, translators, editors, literary agents, and readers have made a difference in the lives of countless individuals. “Only connect,” E. M. Forster’s advice for young novelists, has been my mantra during my tenure at the IWP, which began with rebuilding a storied institution that had fallen apart in the aftermath of the Cold War, included leading the charge for Iowa City to become the third UNESCO City of Literature in 2008, and produced a number of vital literary projects and programs, all of which ended on February 26 when the State Department terminated grants totaling nearly a million dollars. It fell to me to inform our program officer about our stop-work order: she was at a doctor’s appointment, promised to check her email when she got home, and professed never to learn why the IWP had been singled out beyond the Secretary of State’s assertion that our program no longer aligned with “the national interest.”

What the national interest may be, of course, is always subject to debate—an essential element of democracy. Perhaps not since the runup to the Civil War has that debate seemed quite as sharp as it has in the months following the inauguration of Donald Trump, whose attacks on immigrants, NATO, Ukraine, the European Union, the media, judges, law firms, universities, international students, the Department of Education, the Library of Congress, the EPA, NSF, NIH, NEA, NEH, Bruce Springsteen, and Taylor Swift, have damaged if not destroyed what were long considered to be democratic norms—in short, the national interest. It is difficult for me to believe that creating a forum for writers from different countries to exchange ideas, works, and impressions does not contribute to a dialogue central to democracy. From the IWP’s origin in 1967 we have prided ourselves on our ability to respond to changing political circumstances and global affairs: from the Cold War to the establishment of diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, to 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to COVID-19, we found ways to foster the production of international literature until January, when Trump’s landing team arrived at the State Department to manage the transition to the new regime, with members of DOGE in tow.

Soon our program officer was asking us to supply language with which to justify our existence to the landing team. How did the IWP make America safer, stronger, and more prosperous? Plainly our answers—offering writers time and space to write in our UNESCO City of Literature, garner more nuanced impressions of this country, and gain a network of new friends, while introducing American audiences to a wealth of different ways of apprehending the world—did not impress the incoming leadership. Scores of alumni have told us that the IWP played a formative role in their artistic development—praise that seemingly fell on deaf ears at State. Thus a fact sheet highlighting the Nobel laureates we have hosted prompted one official to ask why there were no Americans on the list. I replied that the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which is just across the street from the IWP, has trained enough prizewinning writers for Iowa City to be called Pulitzer Town. This, too, did not alter what in retrospect was probably always a lost cause.

During orientation for the fall residency, I usually note that Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America belongs to a tradition of foreign writers turning their observations about their sojourns in our country into vibrant works of literature, and when the residency coincides with a presidential election I find that our visitors pay close attention to the polls, sometimes choosing to document what they see and hear in the heartland. University of Iowa librarians have collected more than 20,000 volumes of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and plays published by IWP alumni, which provide vivid evidence of the literary delights on offer from our engagement with writers from, well, everywhere. They find language for what they experience during their time in Iowa, and some of it tells us a lot about who and what we are. Why would we not want to hear more?

For example, the jazz vibraphonist Stefon Harris once brought his quartet to the university for a weeklong residency, which included two workshops and a cabaret-style performance with a dozen poets from the IWP. Stefon’s idea was to listen to the poets read in their native language, then use the sounds—the syllables and rhythms—as a springboard for improvisation. He had read English translations of the poems ahead of time, but he was more interested in linguistic textures than in meaning, in the process more than the product. The first poet to offer his work to the musicians, a Lithuanian with a jazz degree from the conservatory in Vilnius, instructed Stefon to play “Take Five.” Stefon, raising an eyebrow, nodded to his pianist, who halfheartedly took up the tune. The bassist and drummer joined in, and Stefon tapped out a line or two. At the conclusion of the piece he said, “That was fine. But that’s not really how we like to play. What we do”—here he smiled at the musicians—“is listen for a door to a space we can enter. If we don’t find anything interesting there, we’ll listen for another door. So why don’t we try that again, with you reading your poem. We’ll listen.” The Lithuanian seemed miffed, but nevertheless he read his poem, at the end of which Stefon turned to the pianist. “I think I hear F sharp minor to D minor. Do you hear that?” The pianist shrugged. “Let’s try it,” said Stefon, and then they were off, playing with the sort of joy that is born of an artist’s decision to surrender to the materials at hand.

In fact the musicians found something to inspire them in every poem. Stefon made notes on their discoveries, the most interesting of which came last, when he asked a poet from Botswana to translate a chant he had written in English into Setswana, his tribal language. The poet obliged. Stefon and the pianist smiled, and what they discovered in their riffs was no less exciting, both in this workshop and in the performance the next night—an hourlong exchange of musical and literary ideas, some of which made it into Stefon’s concert on the last night of their residency. Indeed I was surprised to hear in their final performance several riffs from our workshops, and the journalist in me wondered if the musicians had recycled some old ideas for the poets. The bassist adamantly denied this at the party afterward, insisting that these riffs were new additions to their musical vocabulary. Permanent? I said. No, he said. Just till we get bored with them. But Stefon had the final word: when I asked him the same question, he said the riffs were now a permanent part of his vocabulary. I like to think that once you set a tune in motion it works on all of us.

One year we had in residence three Chinese writers from three generations—a poet, a fiction writer, and a playwright—who met every day to discuss the literary and political situation in their homeland. There is no way to gauge how their conversations will shape China’s future, but I am certain that in their determination to find common ground they created a force for good. In this I am reminded of Winston Churchill’s observation about the usefulness of conferences: that it is better to jaw-jaw than to war-war. For this is how we connect, as we learn in some lines from a poem by Jorie Graham, who was a student and then a teacher in the Writers’ Workshop: “The way things work, / is that eventually / something catches.” The beauty of an exchange program like the IWP is that sometimes things catch, connections are made, and the rest is literature.

As it happens, I have just returned from the Fourth Dialogue on Exchanges and Mutual Learning Among Civilizations in the ancient Silk Road oasis of Dunhuang, China, where three hundred delegates from sixty countries, including writers, sinologists, lawyers, political figures, and representatives of NGOs, gathered to trade ideas about cultural exchanges—and connect. Diversity, that bugaboo of the Trump administration, was in one language or another on everybody’s tongue; also tariffs and Trump’s promise to revoke the visas of the 275,000 Chinese students in America. It was, as you might imagine, disconcerting for me to be invited to speak about some of the Chinese writers I have hosted in Iowa City, including Mo Yan, Su Tong, Yu Hua, Liu Rei, and Xi Chuan, knowing that my staff and I must reimagine what part the IWP, stripped of its federal support and cultural diplomatic role, will play in the literary ecosystem. We must reinvent ourselves, so to say, which is what writers are always obliged to do, no?

In Dunhuang I had the good luck to spend an afternoon visiting the Mogao Caves, also known as the Thousand Buddha Caves, a UNESCO World Heritage Site comprised of grottoes carved into the cliffs above the Dachuan River in Gansu Province and decorated with the most beautiful Buddhist wall paintings and sculptures, some dating back to 366 AD. Here was a place of worship central to the Tang dynasty, where I found myself recalling my introduction as an undergraduate to Ezra Pound’s Cathay: how his translations of classical Chinese poetry shaped the development of modernist poetics, which in turn inspired some of my own poems. And now I thought about the Library Cave, a treasure trove of some 50,000 scrolls and manuscripts of literature, philosophy, art, and medicine, composed in Chinese, Tibetan, Uyghur, Sanskrit, Hebrew, and other languages: how it was inexplicably sealed off in the eleventh century and forgotten until 1900, when a Taoist priest discovered it, thereby saving some portion of a literary inheritance that no one knew anything about. This is, if you like, a study in connections made, missed, and, perhaps, reestablished.

“By itself, wrong spreads nearly five pages/ in the OED,” Williams Matthews observes in A Happy Childhood’s concluding suite of poems, “and meant in its ancestral forms/ curved, bent, the rib of a ship—neither/ straight, nor true, but apt for its work.” His meditation on what it means to be in the wrong ends with a question that has haunted me in this troubling time: “The detection of wrong and the study of error/ are lonely chores; though who is wrong by himself, // and who is by himself except in error?” Pariah states do not emerge by accident but by one error after another, the sum total of which leave their citizens isolated from the rest of the world. And while it may be impossible to enumerate all the wrongs the Trump administration has inflicted on our body politic, denizens of the Republic of Letters know we have our work cut out for us.