Interviewed by Leanne Hayes for ARC magazine, Jamaican-born Ishion Hutchinson talks about childhood, poetry, and his new collection of verse, Far District (2010), which was published by Peepal Tree Press in the UK. Hutchinson holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Utah; his work has been featured in journals including Callaloo and the Caribbean Review of Books. Here are excerpts of the interview with a link to the full article below:

Leanne Haynes: You have said before that you did not grow up surrounded by literature. Can you expand on your upbringing and your affinity for poetry now?

Ishion Hutchinson: My upbringing was simple and typical of any child from rural Jamaica in the late 1980s, and I suspect things are not greatly different, in that I didn’t grow up with the experience of serious reading, where it was a natural part of…