“To close out National Poetry Month, the two writers mused about their new books and the places and sounds that inspired them.

Garrett Hongo and Robin Coste Lewis both attended the same high school in Gardena, California. The two poets are 10 years apart in age, and only met years later—but their respective practices share a preoccupation with that landscape and the migratory geographies that inform it. Lewis’s family can be traced back to Louisiana and moved west during the Second Great Migration. Hongo was born in Hawai’i to Japanese American parents and moved to California as a child. Lewis broke onto the poetry scene with her first collection of poems, Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems, which won a National Book Award in 2015. She only began writing poetry in her late 30s, after an accident left her with a traumatic brain injury. Hongo started publishing his poems in the early 1980s; by 1989, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.”