This week, as the calendar turned to 2015, long-time broadcast journalist Bill Moyers signed off the air. For years, Moyers had a regular show on PBS that not only covered politics, but also offered a space for novelists and poets. Throughout the 1990s, his show covered the Dodge Poetry Festival, and since then, his show has featured interviews with Adrienne Rich, Maya Angelou, Robert Pinsky, Sherman Alexi, Amiri Baraka, and countless other poets. What’s especially saddening about Moyers’ retirement is that it leaves one less space for public discourse regarding the written word.

Here’s one of my favorite interviews Moyers ever conducted. It’s with Adrienne Rich:

More recently, Moyers focused on issues of wealth disparity, climate change, and the influence of money in politics. On his final show, he said to young activists, “Welcome to the fight.” Thank you, Bill, for your decades of broadcast journalism, your belief in the democratic process, and grassroots mobilization. Thanks, too, for all of the interviews with poets you conducted in the years, many of which I’ve used in my classroom. To watch Moyers’ final broadcast, which featured legal school/climate change activist, Mary Christina Wood, click here.