Dorianne Laux
is the author of four collections of poetry, Awake, What We Carry (a finalist for the 1994 National Book Critics Award), Smoke, and Facts About the Moon. She has received a Pushcart Prize for poetry, two NEA fellowships, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Writing and Knowing
What another would have done as well, do not do it. What another would have said as well or written as well, do not say or write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself. — André Gide
There is a world inside each of us that we know better than anything else, and a world outside of us that calls for our attention. Our subject matter is always right with us. The trick is to find out what we know, challenge what we know, own what we know, and then give it away in language.