America's Book Club with Rita Dove on Becoming a Poet

Rita Dove: "I didn't realize that a little black girl could become a poet. I had never met a living poet. And then? Then two things happened. One was that I had an English teacher in high school who took about three of us from the class, asked permission if we could go to a book signing, and she took us to a book signing by John Chardy, who had translated Inferno by Dante, but was also a poet, and he was a living human being with a book that he had written, you know, signing it that I thought, my gosh. And then the other thing was that when I was in college, I literally kind of fell into a creative writing class. I was taking advanced composition. The professor got ill. They asked the fiction professor fiction to take over, and he came in and said, we're going to write short stories. And suddenly I thought, you can take a creative writing class and get credit for it? It was amazing."

SUNDAYAmerica's Book Club with Rita Dove 6pm ET on CSPAN

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