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Meet Alan Shapiro

Monday, June 11 2007 by

Alan Shapiro grew up playing basketball in Brookline, Massachusetts, dreaming of dunking, not writing sonnets. But he's now the author of eight acclaimed books of poetry. He has received the Kingsley Tufts Award and the Los Angeles Times prize for poetry; and his memoir, "The Last Happy Occasion," was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Alan Shapiro tells host Frank Stasio how basketball taught him about form, how being a Jewish-American poet is about humor and grief and what country western singers think on their deathbeds.