Ai (poet)
| Ai | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | Florence Anthony October 21, 1947 Albany, Texas, United States |
| Died | March 20, 2010 (aged 62) Stillwater, Oklahoma, United States |
| Occupation | Poet |
| Nationality | American |
| Genre | Contemporary American Literature |
| Literary movement | none |
| Notable works | Vice (1999) |
| Notable awards |
National Book Award 1999 |
Ai Ogawa (October 21, 1947 – March 20, 2010), born as Florence Anthony, was an American poet and educator. She won the 1999 National Book Award for Poetry for Vice: New and Selected Poems. Ai is known for her mastery of the dramatic monologue as a poetic form, as well as for taking on dark, controversial topics in her work. [1]
Ai, who described herself as half 1/2 Japanese, 1/8 Choctaw-Chickasaw,1/4 Black,1/16 Irish, and Southern Cheyenne, and Comanche, was born in Albany, Texas in 1947, and she grew up in Tucson, Arizona. She was also raised in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and San Francisco, with her mother and second stepfather, Sutton Hayes. In 1959, a couple of years after her mother's divorce from Hayes, they moved back to Tucson, Arizona where she completed high school and attended college at the University of Arizona, where she majored in English and Oriental Studies with a concentration in Japanese and a minor in Creative Writing, to which she would fully commit toward the end of her degree. Before starting college, one night during dinner with her mother and third stepfather, Ai learned her biological father was Japanese. Known as Florence Hayes throughout her childhood and undergrad years, it was not until graduate school, when Ai was going to switch her last name back to Anthony that her mother finally told her more details about her past, learning that she had an affair with a Japanese man, Michael Ogawa, after meeting him at a streetcar stop. Learning of the affair had led Ai's first stepfather, whose last name was "Anthony," to beat her mother until family intervened and she was taken to Texas, where her stepfather eventually followed after Ai's birth. Because her mother was still legally married to Anthony at the time, his last name was put on Ai's birth certificate.
The poverty Ai experienced during her childhood affected her and her writing. Ai credits her first writing experience to an assignment in her Catholic school English class to write a letter from the perspective of a martyr. Two years after that experience, she began actively writing at the age of 14. History had been one of her many interests since high school.
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