Introduction to Poet
Robin Coste Lewis is the author of Voyage of the Sable Venus (2015), the winner of National Book Award for Poetry. She was born in Compton, California and her family is from New Orleans. Lewis is the Poet Laureate of Los Angeles. She is the author of Voyage of the Sable Venus, the winner of the 2015 National Book Award for Poetry. A Cave Canem graduate, she is a Ford Foundation Art of Change fellow, and a writer in Residence at the University of Southern California. When she was six, she told her mother that she wanted to be a writer. At the time, she thought this could only mean being a novelist. In pursuit of that goal, she studied comparative literature as an undergraduate, attended NYU’s Creative Writing Program, and earned a master’s degree in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature.
Everything changed for Lewis after she had an accident that caused her permanent brain damage, keeping her bed-ridden for two years. As part of her long recovery, her neurologist limited Lewis to reading and writing one sentence a day. It was physically painful for Lewis to read and write, so she decided, “OK, if it’s one line a day, it’s going to be a goddamned good line.” It was at this time that she realized she was a poet. Lewis uses minimal words to set a scene whereby the mothers meet and experience all similar ways of life “with fumes of onions and garlic...” Lewis’s poem uses a lot a visual wording such as rubber moons wavering at the garter, she started researching any image or object that included a black female figure.
