I always wanted to be pretty as a girl, although I believed it was not possible.

In various memoir pieces, I have traced the trajectory of yearning through decisions made, good and bad, that had somehow kept the ambition on track.

In actual fact, I have been an academic - a college and university teacher and scholar - for much of the last 45 years, and only rarely a writer.

As the only girl growing up for a long time with only boys, as you pointed out, it seems like I was always surrounded by guys. There was this sense in which my female body was a problem.

Free verse is chained in sentence-to-sentence links and breaks free in line breaks.

In the same way, the people whom I most abhor, I abhor them for elements that I abhor in myself.

Poetry has roots, but they are sometimes cut off and still poetry is written.