Poet Who Knows It

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According to Plato, “At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.” But we’d wager the misery of a breakup has spawned much more passionate rhymes. Literature is a greedy beast who feeds on human suffering, right? Not so, says Zimbabwean poet and novelist Chenjerai Hove: “Maybe the heartaches of society are the envelopes that carry in them the most beautiful parts of the human soul.”

Hove knows heartache. After witnessing Zimbabwe’s war of liberation he wrote critically about the government in his poetry collections Up in Arms and The Red Hills of Home and his first novel Bones. Then goons took his passport and tried to kill him, so Hove fled the country ten years ago, leaving his wife and kids behind.

As the writer-in-residence for City of Refuge, a program that places exiled writers in partner cites, he‘ll live in Miami for the next two years. This Tuesday, he’ll lead a six-week course Introduction to Fiction: Writing from Experience at the Miami-Dade College’s Wolfson Campus where he’ll discuss how to turn personal tragedy into inspired prose.
Tuesdays, 6:30 p.m. Starts: June 1. Continues through July 6, 2010