TALEB-KHYAR: You are two writers of tremendous talent. Beyond any considerations of race, gender, class or culture, your works belong to that common heritage of humanity called the classics. You both enjoy already an international reputation. Your works have crossed national and cultural boundaries, and literary history is beginning to record both of you as two of the most articulate and genuine voices of our time. Rita Dove, you are a prolific poet, fiction writer, and essayist. You are involved with various literary journals and magazines as an editor and as a contributor because, like Maryse Conde, you are also a great discoverer of literature. Your own books include The Yellow House on the Corner, Museum, Fifth Sunday, Thomas and Beulah, and Grace Notes. You are a Pulitzer Prize winner. Previous Pulitzer Prize recipients include most of the greatest names of American Literature. With William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, James Agee, and August Wilson, Rita Dove, you are in very good company indeed. Maryse Conde, you are probably the best thing that ever happened to Guadeloupe since the abolition of slavery. You are a prolific fiction writer, playwright, and essayist as well. And you, too, are a poet in everything you write. You are extremely well known in the Francophone world. Your novel Segou, for example, is now, only six years after its release, a Bible comparable to Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. When it first came out, Segou sold hundreds of thousands of copies and remained for a long time number one on the bestsellers list in France. Your other books include plays such as Dieu nous l'a donne'Mort d'Oluwemi d'Ajumako, and Pension les Alizes, and novels such as Hirimakhonon, Une Saison a'Rihata, La Vie sceWe'rate, Moi, Tituba, sorciere noire de Salem, and Traversee de la mangrove. Your plays have been performed, and are still being performed, in the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, and the United States. My first question has to do with your backgrounds. It is always interesting to hear what a writer has to say about her or his background, but in your cases it is even more interesting since your backgrounds have a direct relevance on your works. One thing you share in common is, as Maryse Conde suggested to me earlier, that you both explored your families' lives, in poetry in Thomas and Beulah, and in prose in La Vie sceWlerate. Another thing you also share in common is an experience of self-exile and the kind of distance that comes with it, which for both of you gave your writing a special twist in many instances. Could you begin this encounter by addressing your backgrounds, for example, how you grew up and how you came to writing?