The following is an edited transcript of Natasha Trethewey’s remarks at the second annual Harper’s Magazine Awards Ceremony, where John Edgar Wideman was honored with the Lewis H. Lapham Award for Literary Excellence. The ceremony was held on Monday, October 26, 2026, at the Morgan Library & Museum.
For nearly six decades, John Edgar Wideman has been producing essential writing that engages with the enduring legacies of America’s troubled and contested past, our shared history, and the intimate challenges of individuals—covering race, culture, and politics. The ongoing pursuit of justice in a world that sometimes appears to tilt between fairness and injustice is undertaken with a fierce, independent intellect, a piercing moral clarity, and a vision that remains uncompromised.
The first Wideman book I encountered was Sent for You Yesterday, the third installment in his celebrated Homewood Trilogy, the work that earned him the first of his two PEN/Faulkner Awards. It was 1992, and I was headed to an MFA program at the University of Massachusetts. Even though my plan was to write poetry, the person I most wanted to study with was John Edgar Wideman.
That turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made—and not only because of his writing, which served as a tutorial in its own right, but also because of the kind of teacher he proved to be, his manner of being in the world marked by grace and dignity, wit and a keen intellect, even in the face of personal hardship and suffering.
I’ll never forget a particular afternoon in his office early in my graduate years, when I sought him out in distress after a renowned poetry professor dismissed my work—and the very reasons I wrote—by telling me to lay bare my blackness and the death of my mother and to “just pour your heart out in the poems.” He listened intently, his gaze drifting toward the window as if he could glimpse beyond the room—across time and space. “You have to write what you have to write,” he said.
Plain as that remark sounded, it marked a turning point in my emergence as a writer. It felt like being granted permission by a figure of immense authority—a writer whose own fearless reckoning in his memoir Brothers and Keepers I already admired. This was years before I would have to confront my own brother’s incarceration and the divergent routes our lives would take. Yet I would return to that moment again and again for the lessons it offered. It embodies a mastery of form that elegantly blends Wideman’s own voice with that of his brother Robby—a profoundly empathetic act, an ethical model for writing about others, especially those who lack a platform from which to tell their stories.
Many of us have witnessed the harm that can be done within graduate programs, and I believe Wideman understood precisely what his encouragement could unlock for a young writer—particularly a young Black writer. As reflected in the title of his deeply researched and imaginative meditation on the intertwined tragedies of Emmett Till and his father, Lewis Till, Writing To Save a Life, Wideman grasped my need to write in order to save a life: not only my own life in the wake of tragedy and trauma, but also the lives of the people I loved—my community—from being erased, forgotten, diminished, or pushed to the margins. That stands as the greatest lesson I received in my early years as a poet—a gift from a writer whose fierce self-scrutiny has sustained him across a remarkable career.
I also recall vividly the night of the release of his novel The Cattle Killing, when I was fortunate enough to hear him read it at UMASS. Seated on the Memorial Hall floor, absorbing the force of his language and his nearly hypnotic prose, I came to understand the importance of contending with personal history while engaging with public history, and of a writer’s duty to seek truth, to confront difficult knowledge in the service of broadening our understanding of the world, and as a path to redress—a form of justice.
Wideman, the author of more than twenty books spanning novels, short fiction, memoir, and nonfiction, is lauded as a master of language and a generation-defining talent, ranking among America’s foremost fiction writers. In the esteemed realm of American letters, he stands not merely as one of our luminaries, but as a writer whose work has decisively shaped—and continues to shape—the best possible version of the American canon.
