by Nina Bahadur

Who am I?

Since I was four years old, I have wanted to become a writer. I have considered various other life paths, from law and medicine to teaching and social work, but I always come back to writing. Journals, stories, poems, articles, starting up a creative writing magazine, and a few ill-fated NaNoWriMo novels occupied most of my free time in middle school and high school. I started sending poems out to literary magazines and competitions, receiving mountains of rejection slips in return. Finally, I had some luck. I was placed third in the 2008 Christopher Tower Poetry competition, and my poem “Heat” was published in their 2008 pamphlet. Nii Parkes, the director of flipped eye press, read my poem and was a drawn to it. He contacted me about publishing a small poetry collection with flipped eye. From winter 2008 until spring 2011, I worked on my manuscript with Nii Parkes and the wonderful Jacob Sam-La Rose. In April 2011, I was holding my début pamphlet, “Every Single One”, in my hands. This summer, I am an editorial intern for a publishing company in Manhattan.

What am I talking about?

This post is the first in a small series about writing. I hope that my posts will be useful not just to students who love writing, but those at every level of ability and interest. Learning to write well is a lifelong process – there is no such thing as a “perfect writer”, and absolutely everyone can improve. In my posts I will cover a variety of topics, from different types of writing to furthering your creativity. This post starts with the fundamental question: how can you write if you don’t read?

[Continue reading to learn about the importance of reading]

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