Natasha Trethewey Honors John Edgar Wideman with Lewis H. Lapham Award

John Edgar Wideman received the Lewis H. Lapham Award for Literary Excellence on Monday, October 26, 2026, at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. Natasha Trethewey, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, delivered the tribute at the second annual Harper's Magazine Awards Ceremony.

Her remarks, published as an edited transcript, praised Wideman's nearly six decades of work grappling with America's fraught past, collective history, race, culture, and politics. She described his career as marked by "a ferocity and independence of mind, searing vision and moral clarity."

How did Wideman change Trethewey's path as a writer?

Trethewey first read Wideman in 1992, the year she entered the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts. The book was Sent for You Yesterday, the third volume of his Homewood Trilogy and the work that earned him the first of his two PEN/Faulkner Awards. Though she had committed to poetry, she chose the university specifically to study with Wideman, a fiction writer.

She called it one of the best decisions of her life. His work alone was a tutorial, but his teaching mattered just as much. She remembered his "way of being in the world with grace and dignity, wit and a piercing intellect, even in the face of personal hardship and suffering."

What did he tell her at her lowest moment?

Early in her graduate career, Trethewey's poetry professor dismissed her work and her reasons for writing. He told her to unburden herself of being Black, to unburden herself of her mother's death, and to "just pour your heart out in the poems." Distraught, she brought her despair to Wideman's office.

He listened, his gaze turned toward the window. Then he offered six words that became a turning point in her life: "You have to write what you have to write." For Trethewey, it felt like permission from the highest authority. Wideman, she believes, understood exactly what such encouragement could do for a young writer, particularly a young Black writer.

Which books anchored the mentorship?

Trethewey's tribute drew repeatedly on Wideman's own writing. She cited his memoir Brothers and Keepers, with its courageous reckoning and its "mastery of form" that melds Wideman's voice with that of his incarcerated brother, Robby. She read it years before she had to confront her own brother's incarceration, and returned to it again and again. The book exemplified, she said, the ethical approach required when writing about people without a platform to tell their own stories.

She also named Writing To Save a Life, his meditation on the intertwined tragedies of Emmett Till and his father, Lewis Till. The title captured what Wideman understood about her need to write: to save lives from being "erased, forgotten, diminished, and shut to the margins."

Trethewey recalled hearing Wideman read from The Cattle Killing at UMass, sitting on the floor of a packed Memorial Hall. His nearly hypnotic prose taught her that a writer's role is to seek truth, to deal with difficult knowledge in the service of enlarging understanding of the world, and as a means of redress, which she called "a kind of justice."

Wideman is the author of more than twenty books spanning novels, short fiction, memoir, and nonfiction. Trethewey's verdict on his standing was unambiguous: his work has shaped and continues to define what the American canon, at its best, is and should be.