A Ceremony at the Morgan, and a Debt Long Overdue
On October 26, 2026, the Morgan Library and Museum hosted the second annual Harper’s Magazine Awards Ceremony, where John Edgar Wideman received the Lewis H. Lapham Award for Literary Excellence. Natasha Trethewey delivered the remarks honoring him – and what she said amounted to something rarer than praise. It was a public accounting of what one writer genuinely owes another.
Wideman has been publishing for nearly six decades. His body of work addresses race, culture, politics, justice, collective history, and the private weight of individual lives – all of it handled with what Trethewey described as ferocity, independence of mind, and moral clarity. That combination is harder to sustain than it sounds, and Wideman has sustained it across a career that most writers wouldn’t dare attempt to outline in a single ceremony speech.
The Book That Came First, and the Program That Followed
The first Wideman book Trethewey ever read was Sent for You Yesterday, the third installment of his Homewood Trilogy and the work for which he earned the first of his two PEN/Faulkner Awards. She encountered it in 1992, traveling toward an MFA program at the University of Massachusetts. She had already decided to write poetry. She had also already decided she wanted to study with Wideman – a choice she describes as one of the best she ever made, and not simply because his fiction functioned as a masterclass in itself.
What she found in him was a particular quality of presence: grace, dignity, wit, and a sharp intellect that held steady even against personal hardship. These are qualities that can be performed in a classroom and sensed immediately as hollow. In Wideman’s case, they weren’t performance. They were the man himself, and Trethewey understood the difference early.
The moment she keeps returning to happened in his office, not long into her graduate studies. She had gone to him distraught, after a poetry professor told her to shed her racial identity and the grief of her mother’s death – to, as Trethewey recounts it, “just pour your heart out in the poems.” The instruction stripped away the very conditions that made her writing necessary. Wideman listened. He looked toward the window, as if past the immediate room and moment. Then he said: “You have to write what you have to write.” Six words. Trethewey calls it a turning point – the feeling of receiving permission from the highest possible authority.
Brothers and Keepers, and the Ethics of Writing Other Lives
The authority she felt came partly from knowing Brothers and Keepers, Wideman’s memoir about his brother Robby’s incarceration and the divergent paths their lives had taken. Trethewey read it years before she would face her own brother’s imprisonment, yet she returned to it again and again as her circumstances changed and the book kept teaching her new things. What she identifies as its central achievement is formal: the way Wideman melds his own voice with his brother’s, producing not a portrait of someone else but a genuine act of empathy. It stands, in her telling, as a model for the ethical demands placed on any writer who chooses to tell a story that isn’t entirely their own – particularly when the subject lacks a public platform to tell it differently.
This is where Wideman’s influence on Trethewey becomes most legible. His work demonstrated that writing about the people you love – and about those who exist at the edges of recorded history – carries a moral obligation that craft alone cannot satisfy. You have to earn the right to represent someone else’s life. Brothers and Keepers shows what earning that right actually looks like on the page.
Writing to Save Lives, Not Just to Tell Stories
Trethewey draws a direct line from Wideman’s encouragement in that office to his later book Writing to Save a Life, a deeply researched meditation on the intertwined tragedies of Emmett Till and his father, Lewis Till. The title, she argues, captures what Wideman helped her understand about why writers write – not to document, not to perform, but to rescue people from erasure. In her case: to prevent the lives of those she loved from being diminished, forgotten, shut to the margins of history and memory.
That understanding arrived alongside an aesthetic lesson she absorbed at a reading Wideman gave at Memorial Hall at UMass. The room was packed. She sat on the floor. He read from The Cattle Killing, the novel published during her time there, and the intensity of his language – prose she describes as nearly hypnotic – made something clear to her about the relationship between personal history and public history. They aren’t separate territories. A writer moves between them not by alternating focus but by recognizing that one is always embedded in the other.
The writer’s role, as Trethewey understood it listening to Wideman read, is to seek truth and to engage difficult knowledge in service of something larger than personal expression. That framing changed the way she thought about her own poetry – about what it could carry, and what it was actually for. It also changed what she was willing to demand of herself on the page.
What’s worth sitting with, after hearing Trethewey’s remarks, is the specific context in which Wideman’s encouragement arrived. She was a young Black writer being told by an established professor to write as if her identity and her grief were obstacles rather than material. Wideman understood, with precision, what his words could do at that moment – and what damage could accumulate if those words were withheld. That understanding, Trethewey implies, is itself a form of mastery, separate from and as important as anything he ever put on a page.
Wideman’s Lewis H. Lapham Award arrives at a ceremony named for a man who spent decades insisting that literature is where a society’s real arguments happen. The award, and the speech that accompanied it, make the case that Wideman has been conducting one of those arguments – rigorously, without concession – for nearly sixty years. Whether the institutions that hand out such honors have kept pace with what his work actually asks of readers is a question the evening didn’t quite answer.
