ANGELA BALL teaches in the Center for Writers at University
of Southern Mississippi, where she is poetry editor for
Mississippi Review.
Her poems and translations have appeared widely in journals
including Atlantic Monthly, Colorado Review, Denver
Quarterly, Field, Partisan Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and
The New Yorker. Her books of poetry include Kneeling
Between Parked Cars (Owl Creek Press, 1990), Possession (Red
Hen, 1995), Quartet (Carnegie Mellon, 1995), The Museum of
the Revolution (Carnegie Mellon, 1999), and Night Clerk at
the Hotel of Both Worlds (University of Pittsburgh Press,
2007), winner of the Donald Hall Prize from the Association
of Writers and Writing Programs.
Honors for Ball’s work have included an Individual
Writer’s Grant from the NEA, an Arthur J. Schiable Award
from the University
of Alaska, Fairbanks, a teaching
residence at the University of Richmond, and invitations to
represent the U.S. at festivals in Rotterdam and Bogotá.
She lives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, with her two dogs, Maggie and Scarlet, and a cat, Frank O’Hara.
Brief Interview with Angela Ball
Since we’re currently in the throes of winter, describe your version of summer in several fragments:
Mourning doves cooing a prelude to lots of hot coffee…Teenagers sliding on their stomachs across wet tarps…A luminous copperhead signing the bike trail… Early summer dissolving as I drive north.
Breakfast or brunch, and if you could eat anything without consequence, what would you have?
Alan Rickman. No. The giant cinnamon roll I ate in Durango, having stolen it from an outlaw.
What are your favorite songs to drive to?
An idiotic French techno-pop tune called “Passez-moi le sel.” “Falling in Love,” by Randy Neuman. “Guilietta Massina,” by Caetano Veloso.
Tell us about the last time you remember laughing really hard?
When we were on vacation at the beach, our supplied corkscrew snapped while being deployed. Car expedition yielded a new corkscrew, but key snapped off in door. When entry gained, second corkscrew snapped. A bad day for domestic metal.
If you could wake up anywhere in the world tomorrow, where would it be?
In a world-class bakery. Poilâne, maybe? Breakfast followed by lessons, lunch, more lessons.