Adrienne, Audre & Alice

A Statement for Voices Unheard: A Challenge to the National Book Awards

Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, and Alice Walker

At the National Book Award ceremony, Adrienne Rich read the following statement, prepared by herself, Audre Lorde, and Alice Walker-all of whom had been nominated for the poetry award. They agreed that whoever was chosen to receive the award, if any, from among the three, would read the statement.

We, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Alice Walker, together accept this award in the name of all the women whose voices have gone and still go unheard in a patriarchal world, and in the name of those who, like us, have been tolerated as token women in the culture, often at great cost and in great pain. We believe that we can enrich ourselves more in supporting and giving to each other than by competing against each other; and that poetry-if it is poetry-exists in a realm beyond ranking and comparison. We symbolically join together here in refusing the terms of patriarchal competition and declaring that we will share this prize among us, to be used as best we can for women.

We appreciate the good faith of the judges for this award, but none of us could accept this money for herself, nor could she let go unquestioned the terms on which poets are given or denied honor and livelihood in this world, especially when they are women. We dedicate this occasion to the struggle for self-determination of all women, of every color, identification, or derived class: the poet, the housewife, the lesbian, the mathematician, the mother, the dishwasher, the pregnant teenager, the teacher, the grandmother, the prostitute, the philosopher, the waitress, the women who will understand what we are doing here and those who will not understand yet, the silent women whose voices have been denied to us, the articulate women who have given us strength to do out work.

Taken from Inviting Transformation, Sonja Foss and Karen Foss, Second Edition. This speech was presented in 1974 for the Poetry Award