14. History had been one of her many interests since high school. Career From 1969 to 1971, Ai attended the University of California at Irvine's M.F.A program where she worked under the likes of Charles Wright and Donald Justice. She is the author of No Surrender, (2010), which was published after her death, Dread (W. W. Norton & Co., 2003); Vice (1999), which won the National Book Award; Greed (1993); Fate (1991); Sin (1986), which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation; Killing Floor (1979), which was the 1978 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets; and Cruelty (1973). She also received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Fellowship Program at Radcliffe College and from various universities. She was a visiting instructor at Binghamton University, State University of New York for the 1973–74 academic year. After winning the National Book Award for Vice she became a tenured professor and the vice president of the Native American Faculty and Staff Association at Oklahoma State University and lived in Stillwater, Oklahoma until her death. Literary views/interviews Ai Ogawa considered herself as "simply a writer" rather than a spokesperson for any particular group. About her own poetry in an interview with Lawrence Kearney and Michael Cuddihy in 1978, she emphasized that there are no "confessional" or autobiographical elements in her work. However, in an interview with Okla Elliott in 2003 after the publication of Dread, she stated that some of the poems and characters in that book are "fictionalized versions" of her family history and that her multi-racial background and interest in history has had a strong influence on her work in this particular collection. In a 1999 interview, Ai was asked about the topics she uses in her writings, such as child abuse, necrophilia, and murder. When asked by interviewer Elizabeth Farnsworth why she chooses to write on these topics, Ai replied that “it’s really the characters, because [she] write[s] monologues” (Farnsworth). She also spoke about her choice of characters that “there’s a lot more to talk about with the scoundrels” (Farnsworth). In that same interview, Farnsworth commented on the fact that even though Ai's poetry is written in first person, she is “almost always someone else” (Farnsworth). Ai also told Farnsworth that her “first poetry teacher said that when you wrote in the first person, that your work was