“One Whole Voice”:
A Celebration of LARB/UCR
Lifetime Achievement Honorees
We are thrilled to be working with the Los Angeles Review of Books to publicize this year’s LARB/UCR Lifetime Achievement Award.
Each year the Los Angeles Review of Books honors a distinguished writer with a Lifetime Achievement Award, celebrating the ways in which they contribute to and change contemporary writing through their fearless originality. This year, they will award three internationally renowned United States Poet Laureates: Rita Dove, Joy Harjo, and Juan Felipe Herrera.
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 4PM (PST)
The Los Angeles Review of Books is proud to present the LARB/UCR Lifetime Achievement Award to three groundbreaking Poets Laureate of the United States. With their brilliant, humane, highly original verse, their lifelong public service, and their mentorship of younger writers, Rita Dove, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Joy Harjo have not only contributed to the cultural life of our nation but have helped to shape it. As the first Black, Latinx, and Native American poets to hold the title of Poet Laureate, Dove, Herrera, and Harjo have worked to bring the American literary establishment closer to its democratic ideals, ensuring that American writers of all backgrounds can aspire to greater heights of achievement, and that the nation’s unfolding song grows richer, truer, and more profound with each generation.
This year’s virtual program will include
⬥ A special poetry reading in the round featuring our three honorees.
⬥ Tributes from poets Rigoberto González, Dean Rader, Safiya Sinclair, Jose Javier Zamora, and others.
⬥ Interview with the honorees.
⬥ Intimate conversation with the Poets Laureate.
⬥ A special Q&A segment with young, emerging poets.
… AND all attendees will receive a special gift book bundle featuring autographed copies of Rita Dove’s Collected Poems 1974-2004, Joy Harjo’s American Sunrise, and Juan Felipe Herrera’s Everyday We Get More Illegal mailed to their homes.
Tickets are very limited. Your ticket benefits the Los Angeles Review of Books, a 501(c)(3) public service nonprofit and is tax-deductible.
RITA DOVE served as Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant to the Library of Congress from 1993 to 1995 and as Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. She has received numerous literary and academic honors, among them the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and, more recently, the 1996 National Humanities Medal from President Clinton, and the 2001 Duke Ellington Lifetime Achievement Award. She has published the poetry collections The Yellow House on the Corner (1980), Museum (1983), Thomas and Beulah (1986), Grace Notes (1989), Selected Poems (1993), Mother Love (1995), On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999), American Smooth (2004), and Sonata Mulattica (2009; winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award), as well as works of fiction and essays. Her latest book, Collected Poems 1974–2004 (2016) was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work.
JOY HARJO the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States, is a member of the Mvskoke Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv (Hickory Ground). Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she left home to attend high school at the Institute of American Indian Arts, which was then a Bureau of Indian Affairs school. She began writing poetry as a member of the University of New Mexico’s Native student organization, the Kiva Club, in response to Native empowerment movements, and went on to earn her MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of nine books of poetry, including In Mad Love and War (1990; winner of the American Book Award and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award), The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (1994; winner of the Oklahoma Book Award), Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (2015; shortlisted for the Griffin Prize and named a Notable Book of the Year by the American Library Association), and her most recent, the highly acclaimed An American Sunrise (2019). Her memoir, Crazy Brave, was awarded the PEN USA Literary Award in Creative Non Fiction and the American Book Award. Harjo is the recipient of numerous honors and recognitions, among them the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Poets & Writers Jackson Poetry Prize, an Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has also published award–winning children’s books, an anthology of North American Native women’s writing, collections of prose interviews, and three plays. She is Executive Editor of the anthology When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (2020).
JUAN FELIPE HERRERA served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2015 to 2017, the first Latino to receive this honor. The son of migrant farm workers, he was educated at UCLA and Stanford University, and received his MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His more than a dozen collections of poetry include Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream (1999), 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border: Undocuments 1971–2007 (2007), Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems (2008; a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle prize), Notes on the Assemblage (2015; named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Library Journal, NPR, and BuzzFeed), and, most recently, Every Day We Get More Illegal (2020). In addition to poetry, Herrera has written short stories, young adult novels, and children’s literature. In 2012, Herrera was named California’s poet laureate. He has won the Hungry Mind Award of Distinction, the Focal Award, two Latino Hall of Fame Poetry Awards, a PEN West Poetry Award, and the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement from the Los Angeles Times. Herrera is also a performance artist and activist on behalf of migrant and indigenous communities and at-risk youth.
We have helped LARB promote similar events, featuring Walter Mosley, Viet Than Nguyen, Margaret Atwood, James Ellroy, among others.
We are looking forward to another greatly successful LARB event.
