Today, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2021, the Academy and PBS released a crowdsourced poem - in text and video - inspired by Margaret Walker Alexander’s 1937 poem “For My People.”
The poem was developed from submissions to PBS American Portrait, which were curated by Pulitzer Prize-winning former Poet Laureate of the U.S. Natasha Trethewey, and then presented in a video featuring original authors and members of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.The idea for the crowdsourced poem emerged from the Academy’s Commission on the Arts as a way to recognize the essential role of the arts in America. The Commission is cochaired by Trethewey with John Lithgow and Deborah Rutter.
Watch the complete video here.
Read the poem, Remix: For My People, here.