I wrote much of my first book of poetry, Gut, during graduate school. When I was working on the first drafts of the earliest poems in the collection, I operated more on feeling than thought—I knew I liked good sounds, I knew I liked surprises, I knew I liked concrete, sensory language, so I leaned into that. I generated voluminously, tracked the patterns afterwards. I let the poems tell me what my book would be about: inheritance, origins, magic, a river. I had an eye, too, on what the next book would explore: bodily autonomy, identity, intimacy, gratitude. Art so often knows us better than we do.

But during the pandemic and its subsequent, still-pressing crises, poetry took on a lesser role in my life. Writing began to feel like something I used to do, before the isolation, before west coast ash darkened skies two thousand miles away. With this diminishing came a feeling of disconnection from both the broader world and from myself. With so many needs crowding our lives—shelter, nourishment, health, safety—it’s difficult to let art be a priority, to listen to that interior voice asking for something more.

Receiving a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts is, for me, a reminder to listen not only to that voice, but to millennia of voices saying what has always been true: Art matters. Poetry matters. A poem can’t end a pandemic, or return lives unjustly lost, or reverse environmental damage, but it can do something singularly vital: it can cross those intangible bridges between people, bridges so many of us have forgotten. Even me, sometimes. This award is a reminder that the scarce hours we have on Earth are for more than simply surviving. My second collection of poetry will be a testament to that—to connection, to more.