How did you first engage with poetry?
My first exposure to poetry, beyond the mush they serve up in high school, was with my uncle Gayle’s poems. He’s a well-known Appalachian poet and started letting me read his work when I was very young, around eleven or so. He treated me like a peer even then, and had already won numerous awards for his work, including an unprecedented three consecutive Plattner awards, a high water mark for Appalachian writers throughout the state. I read and reread his poems back then and can still remember images from them, such as the moon hanging yellow in the sky and one in which he cuts himself shaving while turning thirty. Even today one of my favorite pieces of literature ever is a poem of his called “Nine Cedars” that has as its subject his grandfather and my great-grandfather Augustus Payne Hobson.
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