Fifteen years ago, I walked into Charles D’Ambrosio’s classroom, and — how to say this with a straight face? — he changed my life. He gave me the best advice I’ve ever received about writing essays: Sometimes the problem with an essay can become its subject. The same proved true for his pedagogy: Sometimes the problem with a teacher can become his gift. Charlie was harsh with our writing, but only because he believed so deeply in what writing could be — he got upset when it disappointed that potential and backed away from its difficult thresholds. He infected me with his singular weave of bravery and doubt like a contagion or a creed. (The word “creed” would probably make him uneasy.) I admire his willingness to get into the murk and muck of truth, where things turn strange and contradictory. Also his commitment to nuance and specificity! These days I harp on specificity so much in class that I finally just gave my students a chocolate cake with the words “Get Specific” written in icing on top.

What’s the last book you read that made you laugh?

Poetry isn’t always the first genre that comes to mind when we talk about laughter, but maybe it should be! Kaveh Akbar’s poems in “Calling a Wolf a Wolf” are about drinking and stopping drinking, and darkness, and fetishizing darkness, and also ultimately about delight — and they are so weird and wry about it all. In “I Won’t Lie This Plague of Gratitude,” he writes: “I thought I’d be one of the miserable / ones sainted by pain… / instead I weep openly at obnoxious / beauty … cello music comes in / from blocks away and I lose it completely.” My stepdaughter and I recently hid poems all over our neighborhood and I hid that one in an empty Corona bottle in hopes that some drunk or sober stranger might find in it the joy that I had.

The last book you read that made you cry?

I recently reread “Fort Red Border,” by Kiki Petrosino, one of my favorite contemporary poets. It’s a collection of poems about loneliness and daydreams and Afros and snack foods and — strangely, brilliantly, perfectly — about Robert Redford (the title is an anagram for his name.) Petrosino finds a language for longing that captures how it’s holy and transcendent and crippling all at once. It gets me every time.

The last book you read that made you furious?

Mark Nowak’s “Coal Mountain Elementary” defies easy genre labels — it’s a documentary poem, a collage, a primal cry — and makes me want to throw it against the wall in the best way. It brings together oral testimony from survivors of a West Virginia mining disaster, Chinese newspaper clippings and text from the American Coal Foundation’s curriculum for schoolchildren: how to make coal flowers, how to mine chocolate-chip cookies. It documents the brutality of labor practices we’ve normalized, and exposes the language we’ve used to normalize them. I’ve read it six or seven times and it still gets me in the gut like a sucker punch.

What moves you most in a work of literature?

When it captures the acute simultaneity of human experience, the ways life simultaneously holds grace and terror and grief and hope and wonder and weirdness. We never get the luxury or the prison of an uncontaminated feeling.

What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?

From Briallen Hopper’s wonderful essay collection, “Hard to Love,” I learned about the Foundling Hospital in London, where 18th- and 19th-century mothers would leave the babies they couldn’t afford to take care of. Because they were often illiterate and couldn’t write their names, they would leave their baby with some kind of identifying talisman — a hazelnut shell, a key, a splinter of bone — in hopes of coming back to reclaim them someday. I was so moved by how these objects held grief and hope at once. Acute simultaneity!

How do you organize your books?

Whenever I move, my book organization schemes always start with grand ambitions and ultimately devolve into a desperate attempt to clear the cardboard boxes from my floors by getting all the books on the shelves as quickly as possible. Usually the books end up in thematic microclusters: Books About Archives! Books About Cesareans! Books About Making Babies Fall Asleep at Night! Novels That I Love So Much I Want Them in My Line of Sight at All Times! And now my toddler is always reorganizing my books anyway; I recently found Barthes’s “A Lover’s Discourse” in the recycling. (In its way, it is a book about recycling: “Once the first avowal has been made, ‘I love you’ … merely repeats … the old message.”)