Ai Ogawa (born Florence Anthony; October 21, 1947 – March 20, 2010) was an American poet and educator who won the 1999 National Book Award for Poetry for Vice: New and Selected Poems. Ai is known for her mastery of the dramatic monologue as a poetic form, as well as for taking on dark, controversial topics in her work. About writing in the dramatic monologue form, she's said: "I want to take the narrative 'persona' poem as far as I can, and I've never been one to do things in halves. All the way or nothing. I won't abandon that desire." Early life Ai, who described herself as 1/2 Japanese, 1/8 Choctaw-Chickasaw, 1/4 Black, 1/16 Irish, Southern Cheyenne, and Comanche, was born in Albany, Texas, in 1947, and grew up in Tucson, Arizona. She spent time also in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and San Francisco, living with her mother and second stepfather, Sutton Haynes. In 1959, a couple of years after her mother's divorce from Hayes, they moved back to Tucson, Arizona, where she completed high school and attended college at the University of Arizona, where she majored in English and Oriental Studies with a concentration in Japanese and a minor in Creative Writing, to which she would fully commit toward the end of her degree. Before starting college, one night during dinner with her mother and third stepfather, Ai learned her biological father was Japanese. Known as Florence Hayes throughout her childhood and undergrad years, it was not until graduate school, when Ai was going to switch her last name back to Anthony, that her mother finally told her more details about her past, learning that she had an affair with a Japanese man, Michael Ogawa, after meeting him at a streetcar stop. Learning of the affair had led Ai's first stepfather, whose last name was "Anthony," to beat her mother until family intervened and she was taken to Texas, where her stepfather eventually followed after Ai's birth. Because her mother was still legally married to Anthony at the time, his last name was put on Ai's birth certificate. The poverty Ai experienced during her childhood affected her and her writing. Ai credits her first writing experience to an assignment in her Catholic school English class to write a letter from the perspective of a martyr. Two years after that experience, she began actively writing at the age of