Naomi Shihab Nye Returns as Westminster Poet

Naomi Shihab Nye visited Westminster April 12-15 as the 14th Westminster poet. During her three-day stay, she met with students in their English classes and gave a reading in Werner Centennial Center. She is the first Westminster Poet to return to the Hill for a second visit, having served as the seventh Westminster Poet in 2007.
 

Naomi is a prolific writer, the author and/or editor of more than 30 volumes, including eight volumes of poetry, three collections of essays, two novels for young readers, two picture books and eight prize-winning poetry anthologies for young readers. Students prepared for her visit by reading a variety of her works, including “Honeybee,” “Red Suitcase,” “There Is No Long Distance Now,” “You & Yours” and “Transfer.”
 

Naomi began her reading in the Werner Centennial Center by saying, “It is a great honor to be back at Westminster. I have thought of this school since I was here and am grateful to be invited back.” She then read numerous poems she has written and described the inspiration behind them.
 

She also explained how her notebook is the most important part of her life as a writer, saying, “Most everything I have done started in my notebook.” She credits her favorite poet, William Stafford, for getting her interested in keeping a notebook in order to stay in touch with her life.

She closed her reading with a story from one of her nonfiction essays and then played the guitar and sang “Lullaby Raft.” It was the same lullaby she sang at her reading on campus seven years ago.
 

During her meetings with English classes, she answered student questions about specific poems and explained why she often uses daily life as the focus of her writing. “Because my life is filled with ordinary things, I think dailiness is giving us clues about the larger meaning in life.” She explained that as a child, she felt a compulsion to study the details in life. “I am a listener and an observer.”
 

“Naomi’s first visit to Westminster seven years ago was so perfect that it was hard for me to imagine that her return visit could be better,” said Michael Cervas, head of the English Department. “But it was. Her poems, themselves, are so interesting, so varied, so surprising that students naturally are taken by them. And, as was true of her earlier visit, Naomi proved to be remarkably generous, too, in answering questions and in respecting student opinions during the class sessions. Singing the lullaby at the end of her reading affirmed it as a way of ending her visits to Westminster (we're the only place she visits that she ends her readings that way). Naomi's insistence on the value of keeping a daily writing journal may end up being the most important contribution she makes to the lives of our students.”
 

Naomi has won many awards and honors, including four Pushcart Prizes, the Golden Rose Award, a Lavin Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize. She has also been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow and a Witter Bynner Fellow at the Library of Congress. In October 2012, she was named laureate of the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature.