The National Book Awards will be announced November 14, and John Ashbery and Mitchell Kaplan will receive lifetime achievement awards. Poet John Ashbery has given us verses like these from “The New Higher”:

“You meant more than life to me. I lived through

you not knowing, not knowing I was living.

I learned that you called for me. I came to where

you were living, up a stair. There was no one there.”

Mitchell Kaplan is the creator of the Miami International Book Fair, “the largest community book festival in the United States and a model for book fairs across the country,” notes the National Book Foundation.