Terrance Hayes

I became a poet in Pittsburgh. When I lived in the South, I was a basketball player and primarily a jock. An English teacher essentially suggested that I send the poems that I'd been writing - really just for him - to a few programs, so that when I wound up in Pittsburgh, it's where I figured out that I could actually be a poet.

When I applied for grad school, I did not specify genre. I said I wanted an MFA in Creative Writing. I was so cute and stupid! The admissions committee at Pitt decided to put me in poetry.

We can't really know ourselves because we have not created ourselves. But we can know computers, we can know cars, because anything that we made, we can understand.