Robin Coste Lewis Turns Tragedy to Triumph

After Robin Coste Lewis incurred brain damage from falling through a hole in the floor of a San Francisco restaurant, it took her a year just to relearn the alphabet. By the time she could compose a sentence, her doctor said she wouldn’t be able to write more than one line a day. In a conversation with Hilton Als, The New Yorker’s theatre critic, Lewis says that her disability changed her focus, and led her to her career as a poet. Lewis’s début collection, “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” just won the National Book Award in poetry. She’s grown comfortable with the limitations her injury places on her; in fact, she finds her unique brain “kind of sexy.”

Produced by Steven Valentino.