Gala Honors the Power of Words
Clockwise from top left: New York State Poet and 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize winner Patricia Spears Jones opens the 2024 Poets & Writers Gala with a poem; host David Remnick presents the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award to Roxane Gay; Laurie Halse Anderson accepts the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award; Mitchell Kaplan accepts the Champion for Writers Award; from left: honoree Nikole Hannah-Jones with Poets & Writers board member Sanyu Dillon, president of Random House Publishing Group, and gala chair Nihar Malaviya, CEO of Penguin Random House. (Credit: Margarita Corporan)
“Considering who we honor tonight, this is a gathering devoted to the principles and the practical politics of freedom, particularly the freedom to write, to publish, to read,” said host David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, upon welcoming guests to the Poets & Writers gala on March 26 in New York City. “We’re here above all as a gesture of solidarity and support of that freedom, which is under severe attack, in our libraries and our schools.”
Remnick addressed nearly six hundred writers, agents, editors, publishers, booksellers, and readers gathered to support Poets & Writers and honor leaders in the fight against book banning and censorship. Laurie Halse Anderson, Roxane Gay, and Nikole Hannah-Jones each received the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award recognizing writers who have given generously to other writers or to the broader literary community, and bookseller Mitchell Kaplan was recognized as an exceptional advocate for writers with the Champion for Writers Award.
The evening’s honorees reflected on the high stakes of the current moment, when the American Library Association reports that attempts to ban books in the United States have reached record highs. “Words have the ability to give power to those who believe they have none. … Reading changes minds, reading changes policy, and reading can lead to the toppling of systems of oppression,” said Hannah-Jones, the driving force behind the groundbreaking 1619 Project. She added, “I do not have to tell a room full of writers that those who ban books, who target writers, who seek to make the teaching of certain ideas illegal do so because they know they cannot make a better argument, and they want to narrow the possibilities of what we can imagine for our world.” Kaplan, founder of Books & Books in Miami and cofounder of the Miami Book Fair, said, “A good book is an empathy machine, and it makes perfect sense…that those in the business of marginalizing people want to take our stories away by taking away our books. We can’t let them do that.”
Thanks to leadership from gala chair Nihar Malaviya, CEO of Penguin Random House, and the Poets & Writers Board of Directors, the event raised more than $1,032,000 to support Poets & Writers’ programs and services for creative writers.