ALT A smiling young Black girl with pigtails and a white collar poking out of a dark blue sweater kneeling in front of a bookshelf. Including here as well 1/2 of the next image’s caption: A few nights ago, I watched "Butterfly in the Sky: The Story of Reading Rainbow,” a beautiful documentary about the making of the iconic PBS series. The film opens with host living legend LeVar Burton sharing his favorite book from the entirety of the show's twenty-plus year run. To my shock and immense delight, he selects Amazing Grace, *my* very favorite book as a little girl. Amazing Grace is about a little Black girl who LOVES stories, reading them, listening to grown-ups tell them, acting them out, and especially *making up her own.* When some classmates tell her she can't be Peter Pan in the school play because she's Black and a girl, her books and her family encourage her to be brave and believe she can be *anything*. When I was in 3rd grade, I was told the same thing about playing the Pied Piper

ALT Caption continued, part 2 of 2: Because I had read Amazing Grace, because I had a bin of books in my bedroom and a village of grownups who told me I could be anything, I believed I could do it, and I did. Years later, as something like a grownup myself, I believed I could write poems and share them with the world, and I did. And I do. Literature is the key to unlocking so many children's dreams. We must keep it alive so our littlest butterflies have their chance to soar. Thank you to folks at the National Endowment for the Arts for their continued belief in the poets and translators who *know* we can do anything we dream of. And major congratulations to my fellow fellows-what a resilient, beautiful group we are. I'm proud to be among us.