Introducing the 2019 Library Lions Honorees

Each year, The New York Public Library honors several distinguished individuals for outstanding achievements in their respective fields of arts, culture, letters, and scholarship by naming them Library Lions. This year the Library is pleased to announce the 2019 Library Lions: Elizabeth Alexander, Philip Glass, Jamaica Kincaid, Jill Lepore, and Frederick Wiseman.

Elizabeth Alexander—poet, educator, memoirist, scholar, and cultural advocate—is president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the nation's largest funder in arts and culture, and humanities in higher education. Dr. Alexander has held distinguished professorships at Smith College, Columbia University, and Yale University, where she taught for 15 years and chaired the African American Studies Department. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, serves on the Pulitzer Prize Board, and co-designed the Art for Justice Fund. Notably, Alexander composed and delivered "Praise Song for the Day" for the inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2009, and is author or co-author of fourteen books. Her book of poems, American Sublime, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 2006, and her memoir, The Light of the World, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography in 2015.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Philip Glass is a graduate of the University of Chicago and the Juilliard School. By 1974, Glass had created a large collection of music for The Philip Glass Ensemble. The period culminated in the landmark opera, Einstein on the Beach. Since Einstein, Glass's repertoire has grown to include music for opera, dance, theater, orchestra, and film. His scores have received Academy Award nominations (Kundun, The Hours, Notes on a Scandal) and a Golden Globe (The Truman Show). Recent works include an opera on Walt Disney, The Perfect American, Glass's memoir, Words Without Music,  and Symphony No. 12. Glass received the U.S. National Medal of the Arts from President Barack Obama in 2016 and the 41st Kennedy Center Honors in December 2018. Current projects include an original score for a new Broadway production of King Lear, and a theater collaboration with director Phelim McDermott entitled "Tao of Glass" to premiere at the Manchester International Festival in July 2019."

Writer, novelist, and professor, Jamaica Kincaid's works include Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, and Mr. Potter, as well as her classic history of Antigua, A Small Place, and memoir My Brother. Her first book, the collection of stories At the Bottom of the River, won the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Kincaid's last novel, See Now Then, was published in 2013. Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence at Harvard University, Kincaid was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004. She has received a Guggenheim Award, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, the Prix Femina Étranger, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Clifton Fadiman Medal, and the Dan David Prize for Literature in 2017.

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard. Much of her scholarship explores absences and asymmetries in the historical record, with a particular emphasis on the history and technology of evidence. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes about all sorts of things, including American history, law, literature, and politics. She is the author of more than a dozen books, including Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin,  The Secret History of Wonder Woman, These Truths: A History of the United States, and This America: The Case for the Nation. Lepore is the recipient of many honors, awards, and honorary degrees, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award; the National Magazine Award; and, twice, for the Pulitzer Prize. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and three sons.

Frederick Wiseman is a film and theatre director of 43 films, primarily focusing on American institutions. In 2018, he was the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University. In 2016, he received an Honorary Award for lifetime achievement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Board of Directors. He is a MacArthur Fellow, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has won numerous awards, including four Emmys. In recent years, he directed Beckett's Happy Days and Vassili Grossman's The Last Letter at the Comédie Française in Paris, and The Last Letter at Theatre for a New Audience in New York. In 2017, Wiseman highlighted NYPL's offerings and resources in Ex Libris: The New York Public Library.

Previous Library Lions honorees include author Margaret Atwood, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, South African President Nelson Mandela, actor Steve Martin, opera singer Jessye Norman, director Martin Scorsese, novelist Zadie Smith, activist Gloria Steinem, media mogul Oprah Winfrey, and many more.

The five recipients of the institution’s highest honor will be celebrated during the Library Lions ceremony on November 4, 2019. Follow #LibraryLions on social media and @NYPLEvents on Instagram where we will be sharing live coverage of the event.

Update from November 13, 2019:

If you'd like to see a highlight of photos from the ceremony, please click here.