News at Eleven: "The hardest thing for me to accomplish

was the realization that I had my own voice.

"My poetry was supposed to be me, just me," she [Charlene Spearen] learned--not something tortured by the deep inner meanings her high school English teachers had insisted poetry contained.

"Once I accepted this, it wasn't a struggle any longer."

Now in her 60s--she won't say exactly how old she is but chuckles at [Kwame] Dawes' description of her as "chronologically mature"--Spearen is a professor of English and chair of the Humanities Division at Allen University.

from The State: Slowly finding 'the music of the poem'

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