Senator Cory Booker opened a workshop designed to assist university professors and non-profit organizations tap into the resources of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the New Jersey Council for the Humanities last week at Rider University with the words: “America needs more poets.” Mr. Booker, who currently serves on three U. S. Senate committees: Science and Transportation, Small Business and Entrepreneurship, Environment and Public Works, spoke of the critical nature of the humanities to the American psyche and to the nation’s well-being and future success, and went on to describe his own upbringing and education. He ended with lines from Langston Hughes’s poem “Let America Be America Again:” “O Let America be America again/Let it be the dream it used to be./Let it be the pioneer on the plain/Seeking a home where he himself is free./(America never was America to me).”