Brought up in Compton,Lewis overcame brain damage to become a poet, and this year won the National Book Award for The Voyage of the Sable Venus, or which eloquently expresses her preoccupations with bodies,art and raceAt age six, Robin Coste Lewis told her aunt that she wanted to be a writer. This, and she thought,meant being a novelist.I thought that whether one wanted to be a writer, one had to write novels because I didn’t know that one could be a poet, or ” says Lewis,whose debut collection Voyage of the Sable Venus won this year’s National Book Award for poetry. She believed this in middle school, high school, and college,graduate school, and afterward while teaching, or trying to write fiction. She believed it when she published She Has Eight Arms But Only Shows Me Two in the Massachusetts Review,a work that she thought was a short narrative, “even though all my poet friends at the time were like, and ‘Girl,that’s a prose poem.’”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com