In many places around the world, academic freedom and its practitioners are under attack, Falk reminded the audience. What your membership in Phi Beta Kappa signifies is your deep engagement with what is actually the core of this university,” he said. If I just look a little closer, look a little longer, a little deeper,” Diaz said.įalk, a former president of Williams College, talked about the importance of academic freedom and the responsibility of PBK’s newest members to protect it in his address titled “The Price of the Pin.” “One of the most important gifts poetry has given me is that it’s taught me that the ordinary is extraordinary. During the ceremony, she read three of her poems, pulling from both of her collections, “When My Brother Was an Aztec” and “Postcolonial Love Poem” (2020), which won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. She’s an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe and spoke about how her experience as a Mojave woman fuels her poetry. Falk delivered the traditional oration, taking as his topic current threats to academic freedom.ĭiaz, a former MacArthur fellow, was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. ’91, a theoretical physicist who is currently president of the Alfred P. This year, the ceremony honored the 176 students from the Class of 2023 who will be joining the ranks.ĭiaz, the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University, shared the stage with Adam Falk, Ph.D. Students are selected by Harvard faculty and senior staffers who are also members of the group. The annual Commencement week event marks the induction of some of the College’s most gifted students into the nation’s oldest academic honor society. She told the newest inductees into PBK: “I wish that whether it comes through poetry or anything else that you love, that you have that place to find love.” “Poetry is a place where I can look at my brother and love him in ways that I can’t in my every day,” she said. It allowed her to process her relationship with him in a way that helped her better navigate the world.
She shared with the audience that her brother, who struggles with addiction, was the inspiration for her first collection of poems, “When My Brother Was an Aztec” (2012). “Poetry is where I can love who and what are most difficult to love in this world,” Diaz said Tuesday morning at Sanders Theatre. Celebrated poet Natalie Diaz urged students and attendees of the Phi Beta Kappa Literary Exercises to consider how poetry can be a powerful conduit for connecting with others.
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