This year at the American Academy, I first finished my forthcoming nonfiction book, The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam. The book is the product of seven hard years of reportage in Africa and Asia, investigating the place where the world is coming apart between the equator and the line of latitude seven hundred miles to the north, in Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia and the Horn of Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Then I worked on my second book of poems: a collection that has grown out of the gruesome tales of shape shifting in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I also took the opportunity to travel to lands of Africa that Rome once occupied—the ancient and recent—in Libya and Ethiopia, where I worked on poems.