I sold my first poem when I was eight—sort of.

At a school fair in my hometown of Pownal, Maine, I set up a small table to sell animal figurines, each paired with a poem. Poetry was so central to my life then that I could not conceive of making something—in this case, little sculptures made of rocks hot-glued together—without pairing it with a few rhyming lines. My parents are not poets or particularly fond of poetry, but as an elementary school student, I surrounded myself with poetry. We read poems in class; my parents picked out library picture books that were essentially poetry and pictures; Reading Rainbow lit up our television screens. If I wanted to express myself, poetry was how I did it.

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