Wow. You know, what led me to become a poet and a writer? There’s a big story there in the sense that my parents are writers. My father wrote 16 books, these huge educational tomes that I just loathed having to read as a kid. My mother was an English teacher too — and they both studied children’s literature in grad school. And so from the time that I can remember, I was immersed in Eric Carle and Lucille Clifton and Eloise Greenfield and Shel Silverstein and Lee Bennett Hopkins and Nikki Giovanni and Langston Hughes and the list goes on and on.
And so I knew poetry like the back of my hand. And so what’s funny to me is that, you know, when I got to Virginia Tech and I ended up studying with Nikki Giovanni and having three, you know, dynamic, tense, incredibly academically challenging years with her, I knew I wanted to be a writer. In particular I knew I wanted to write poetry now. She was sort of my model for how to live, how to be a poet.
And so I come home after college and tell my dad and my mom, who were writers, that I want to be a poet. That’s going to be my job. And of course my dad laughed. He said that will never work. And my mother was very supportive, as mothers are. And I think that, you know, my father tells me now that he only said that to see if I was really serious, if I was really going to stick to it. And of course I did. And so I think if you can be trained or nurtured or natured or groomed to be a poet, I think I was. I think it was my parents.
