NL: Can you share a bio with us?
BK: I have been an Army officer, high school teacher, college professor and, primarily, a journalist. I retired after nearly 40 years at the New York Daily News, where I was, variously, an investigative reporter, columnist, editorial writer and senior editor. For my non-fiction book, The Murder of a Shopping Bag Lady, I hung out with homeless folks in city shelters and the streets off and on for three years. It was praised by the New York Times Book Review as “a book in the grand journalist tradition” and honored by Mystery Writers of America with a Special Edgar Allan Poe Award. My poetry has been published in many journals in the U.S. and abroad. I live with my wife in a house in the woods in Pomona.
NL: What are you currently reading? Do you like it?
BK: I’m really liking The Work of Art by Adam Moss, in which various writers and artists show how they conceived a particular work and brought it to fruition. Especially interesting to me was the interview with poet Louise Glück in which she talks about her poem Song. Readers are treated to reproductions of her handwritten drafts. I’m also reading the Library of America’s collection of the speeches and writings of Frederick Douglass, as vital now as they were in the 1850s and ‘60s.
NL: If you could have any author speak at Nyack Library, who would it be and why?
BK: Ah, so many to choose from. I’d suggest Marie Howe, poet-in-residence at The Cathedral Church of St John the Divine and former New York State poet laureate. Her work is luminous, eloquent and intense.
NL: Which character in a book do you most identify with?
BK: Harold, the curious and indomitable 4-year-old of Crockett Johnson’s wondrous children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon. Harold’s ability to draw himself out of impossible situations with well-placed lines from his magic crayon is a kind of metaphor for my life as an investigative journalist.
NL: What books are on your night stand?
BK: In addition to The Work of Art, Language City, by Ross Perlin (about the many endangered languages spoken and kept alive in New York City); Poetry Unbound by Pádraig Ó Tuama (ruminations on the work of 50 international poets) and Michael Kimmelman’s The Intimate City, an architectural walking tour though the five boroughs of New York. And, of course, Walt Whitman is always by my bedside.
NL: Are there any books that you feel are overrated?
BK: Yes. (Enough said!)
NL: Do you have a literary “guilty pleasure”?
BK: I never feel guilty about the pleasure of books.
NL: Would you ever organize your books by color? Yea or Nay?
BK: Nay! Though when looking through my haphazard library for a particular volume, I often find it by remembering the color of its dust jacket.
NL: What do you plan to read next?
BK: Haven’t a clue.
NL: What’s the first book that you remember reading?
BK: Sad to say, the dreadful Dick and Jane readers of my 1950s first and second grades. But the first books that really gripped me as a young boy were Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped.
NL: What’s your least favorite book?
BK: I was forced to read Silas Marner in tenth grade and have never gotten over hating it. Ah! Perhaps that’s the clue I needed. Maybe I should put “Silas Marner” (ugh!) on my read-next list. Time to give up that ancient grudge.