BEST AUTHOR BEST : STEPHANIE BURT [ 2 ]

.-  WHAT'S your favorite book no one else has heard of ?

The question has no answer, taken literally, since of somebody wrote it and somebody published it then somebody else has heard of it, but I can name two books with very few present-day readers that, in a better world, would find many.

Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt's '' Dramatic Persons and Moods '' [ 1880 ] shows this disillusioned, patient, tolerant, poet of motherhood, romantic disappointment, and coping strategies of her resilient best.

Imagine talking a kid through her first heart-break using only the tools available to middle-class moms in the 1870s. Then imagine being that kid.

And for more recent work : I found Allan Peterson's '' Anonymous Or '' [2002] in a used bookstore in St. Paul, Minn., a few years after it came out, and I've been recommending him ever since.

He's still writing! His poems have compound eyes, like great sparkling beetles, and elaborate sentences, like networks of banyans. And they're kind.

.-  Do you think any canonical books are widely misunderstood?

I do. Books and authors. Few more so than Langston Hughes, whose continuing status as a spokesperson for Black America [ * I am the darker brother * ] has occluded his range of techniques,  his varieties of irony, and his other inexhaustible subject :

The way that our economic lives [ who pays the rent? ] can shape our emotional inner worlds [ what do you really want? who do you love].

People should read Hughes's '' Montage of a Dream Deferred '' [ 1951 ] the way people read T.S. Eliot's '' The Waste Land.'' Some people do. But not enough.

.-  Which genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid?

I try to keep up with poetry in English, not just in the United States but in other countries, as much as I can do [ it's literally my job ]. I seek out music writing, in books and online.

I also seek out Y.A. science fiction and fantasy; I seem to set a higher bar for realistic fiction about modern adults, which is [ of course ] a genre just as much as the space opera and ancient Greek romance and genres.

.-  You seem to have put other projects on hold to get this one out. What are they and why was it important to write. '' Taylor's Version '' first ?

Other projects : a book about Walt Whitman; fiction, co-written with Rachel Gold; the next book of poems by me [ current title : '' Read the Room '']; an essay about how to read poems from New Zealand if you're not [ and I'm not ] from New Zealand .

A pitch, perhaps, someday, for a Marvel comic. Among all these, '' Taylor's Version'' had the momentum.

I already had a lot to say. I had taught the course from which it arose. And, honestly, it's got a bigger potential audience. I like that sense of an audience. Most of the time.

The World Students Society thanks The New York Times.