While we’re on the topic of family, your granddaughters, Tai and Mollie, were both born in China and adopted by your daughter and her husband. What is it like having grandchildren?

It’s everything it’s cracked up to be and more. It was not an ambition to which I had paid much attention. Turns out it ranks highest on my list of joys. Tai Lane, 11, and Mollie, 7, are bright, beautiful and affectionate kids. Tai is a talented painter and Mollie can best us all at wordplay. And they live in Raleigh now instead of New York as they did earlier. Perfect.

Have they changed your perception of writing in any way?

They have taught me things I use in my poems, perceptions I could not have had without these two small persons in my life; but my perceptions about writing itself remain the same. I do, however, spend more time with children’s literature than I used to!

Will Chinese culture be a part of Tai and Mollie’s growing up?

Tai and Mollie are very conscious of their Chinese heritage. At age 5, Tai went to China with her parents to get her little sister. She climbed the Great Wall and saw all manner of wonderful things, including the ancient bells of Wuhan. But she and another child with the group were thrilled to discover a McDonald’s in Beijing — they are American kids. However, they perform with the dancers in Raleigh’s yearly Chinese Festival sponsored by the Chinese community here. And Tai has become very good at traditional Chinese painting techniques, taking private lessons. The four-panel silk screen she hand-painted hangs in her parents’ dining room and no one guesses it was done by a child. But I am doing the typical grandma thing, bragging.

How did you come to live in North Carolina?

I married a North Carolinian. I met Don when I was 17 and he was teaching in a Deming, New Mexico high school. My roommate at school in Dallas was from Deming and she took me home with her for spring break. I met this wonderful older guy who loved poetry and was a marvelous musician. I decided then and there to marry him, which happened a year later, after my first year of college. Don moved back to North Carolina to be near his mother who was ill. We hadn’t necessarily intended to stay — but he was soon offered a position as Associate Director of Music at North Carolina State University and here we still are.