John Balaban, author of Empires (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), has written numerous other books of poetry, as well as fiction, nonfiction, and Vietnamese translations, and his work has been awarded the Academy of American Poets’ Lamont Prize, a National Poetry Series selection, and two nominations for the National Book Award. His Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New and Selected Poems won the 1998 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Balaban lives with his wife and daughter in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he teaches at North Carolina State University.

Photograph by Carolla Clift.

Best Advice

by John Balaban

It was the sixties, and I was in college and incredibly restless. Besides sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, the politics of the times were overwhelming. I remember sitting in one of the thousands of buses streaming into Washington, DC, for the 1963 civil rights march and sticking my head out the window as we entered the city, and as far as I could see up and down the avenue there were chartered buses rolling into the capital in one long caravan and nothing else moving on the streets, just black people on sidewalks and front porches waving at the buses and cheering.

People on couch
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