Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.

I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.

I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.

Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

Girls' education is a human right. And along with its fundamental justice, it promises so much for the individual, for her family, for society, for all of us.

That difficult start drove me on to inspire children and let them know that it is never to late to repair a bad experience at school, and once you get your head down and start to read books, you can really achieve.

I was only fifteen when I finished my high-school studies, always having held first rank in my class. The fatigue of growth and study compelled me to take almost a year's rest in the country. I then returned to my father in Warsaw, hoping to teach in the free schools.

We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed.