2024 NATIONAL MEDAL
for Museum and Library Service Finalist

Adults

Make Me Rain

The seven-time NAACP Image Award-winning poet unapologetically celebrates her heritage in a deeply personal collection of verse that speaks to the injustices of society and the depths of her own heart

Taking The Arrow Out Of The Heart

Alice Walker shares a timely collection of nearly seventy works of passionate and powerful poetry that bears witness to our troubled times, while also chronicling a life well-lived. From poems of painful self-inquiry, to celebrating the simple beauty of baking frittatas, Walker offers us a window into her magical, at times difficult, and liberating world of activism, love, hope and, above all, gratitude.

Americans' Favorite Poems

The selections in this anthology were chosen form the personal letters of thousands of Americans who responded to Robert Pinsky's invitation to write to him about their favorite poems. Some poems are memories treasured in the mind since childhood; some crystallize the passion of love or recall the trail of loss and sorrow. The poems and poets in this anthology―from Sappho to Lorca, from Shakespeare and Chaucer to Gwendolyn Brooks, Louise Bluck, and Allen Ginsberg―are poems to be read aloud and memorized, poems to be celebrated as part of our nation's cultural inheritance.

Vinegar Hill

A wide variety of poems, ranging in setting and topic, Vinegar Hill deals with gay experience and with the experience of loss, with memory and a fading past as well as the present moment

Ten Poems To Change Your Life

Through the voices of ten inspiring poets and his own reflections, the author of Sacred America shows how poetry illuminates the eternal feelings and desires that stir the human heart and soul. These poems explore such universal themes as the awakening of wonder, the longing for love, the wisdom of dreams, and the courage required to live an authentic life. In thoughtful commentary on each work, Housden offers glimpses into his personal spiritual journey and invites readers to contemplate the significance of the poet's message in their own lives.

Wade in the Water

In Wade in the Water, Tracy K. Smith boldly ties America’s contemporary moment both to our nation’s fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. These are poems of sliding scale: some capture a flicker of song or memory; some collage an array of documents and voices; and some push past the known world into the haunted, the holy. Smith’s signature voice―inquisitive, lyrical, and wry―turns over what it means to be a citizen, a mother, and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men, and violence.

Balladz

It is Olds's gift to us that in the richly detailed exposure of her sorrows she can still elegize songbirds, her true kin, and write that heaven comes here in life, not after it.

Musical Tables

Here Collins writes about his trademark themes of nature, animals, poetry, mortality, absurdity, and love—all in a handful of lines. Neither haiku nor limerick, the small poem pushes to an extreme poetry’s famed power to condense emotional and conceptual meaning. Inspired by the small poetry of writers as diverse as William Carlos Williams, W.S. Merwin, Kay Ryan, and Charles Simic, and written with Collins’s recognizable wit and wisdom, the poems of Musical Tables show one of our greatest poets channeling his unique voice into a new phase of his exceptional career.

Maps

John Freeman's first poetry collection charts the impact of place on human experience. In Beirut, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Rome, and the foothills of a childhood hometown, Freeman navigates legacies of ruin and construction, illness and memory. Warm, mournful, and distinctly urban, Maps offers a compassionate perspective from the experience of one American embroiled in empire.