Where Words Prevail Not
“Where words prevail not, violence prevails.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about that phrase in recent weeks. It comes from the playwright Thomas Kyd, a contemporary of William Shakespeare, and I learned it from Cicely Berry, famed vocal coach at the Royal Shakespeare Company, whom I was privileged to know. It was her motto, and she quoted it whenever asked why she did what she did—why she cared about Shakespeare and language.
As I write this a new wave of violence has been unleashed in an already dangerous world. On October 7, 2023, Hamas attacked Israel, killing more than a thousand Israelis and taking hundreds hostage, including children. That terrible violence has been answered by more violence, with Israeli bombs killing an estimated 11,000 Palestinians, as of this writing, including children. The brutality of the conflict is incomprehensible, as is the widening humanitarian crisis in Gaza. A viable path to justice and peace is very hard to discern.
Here in the United States, antisemitism and Islamophobia, ever present, are ascendant. There is a chill in the air, and people are careful about what they say.
Meanwhile, efforts to ban books and otherwise curtail intellectual freedom, even criminalizing the discussion of certain ideas in schools and universities, show no signs of slowing. While these tactics are nothing new, they are shocking nonetheless. As has been widely documented, books dealing with the long, sorry history of racism in this country are frequently targeted, as are books by gay and trans writers, and books that explore gender, sexuality, or sexual violence from any perspective. Efforts to suppress these stories and ideas are directly linked to the pervasive violence directed against BIPOC people, the LGBTQIA+ community, and women.
How in such a world should we think about the work of Poets & Writers? In the face of relentless, epic, tragic violence, concern for writers and books can seem irrelevant. But our work is relevant and essential because the work of writers is relevant and essential. Only by holding space for stories to be shared and ideas debated—including stories that come from viewpoints we find hard to understand and ideas that are difficult and even antithetical to our own—can we have any hope of building a more just and loving world.
In 2020, Poets & Writers was challenged to reflect on racism in our organization and our field. Although the wave of corporate concern for racial equity seems to be waning, we are determined to stay with it. We continue to consider how our programs can help to level the playing field for BIPOC writers and are more intentional about amplifying voices that have been too often marginalized. (You can read more about our commitment to antiracism at pw.org/about-us/commitment_to_antiracism.)
We have tried also to incorporate an antiracist lens into our organizational culture. One of the ways we’ve done this is through an ongoing series of informal conversations. We focus on a piece of media—an essay or a podcast—that contends with some aspect of racism and invite board and staff members to spend an hour discussing it. Participation is voluntary. It has given us a chance to talk across many differences—of race and age and relative power within the organization—about topics that can be hard to discuss, especially at work. We aren’t trying to problem-solve; the conversation is open ended and we are able to speak from personal experience, getting to know one another better and building a reservoir of care and trust. The idea is simple enough: creating a place where we can grapple with difficult topics and regard one another with generosity and interest and concern.
That is what the best writers—and the best readers—do too. Remaining in conversation is the alternative to violence. The mission of Poets & Writers is to serve writers, creating access and opportunities, especially for those who are so often excluded and silenced. Writers come to us to learn in community with other writers, to find opportunities to get their work published, and to access resources—information, funding, and more—so they can add their voices to the conversation. Aiding them is our modest but essential contribution to the bulwark against violence.
—Melissa Gradel, executive director, Poets & Writers