"'These people who are characters in my poems, if I wrote them well enough, you can experience what they're living through, what they're going through,' he said. 'It's like a moment of stillness in the chaos, so you can see people's faces, almost in slow motion, as they pass you by.'" In this Arizona Republic profile on 2011 Whiting Award winner Eduardo C. Corral, he describes his journey becoming a poet, from discovering poetry through a school assignment on Beowulf, to his time at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Corral was in Uruguay this fall as part of an international-writers program run by the University of Iowa when he received the e-mail from the Whiting Foundation telling him he'd won the award.

"'I have a dream,' he said, 'of taking my nieces and nephews to the library, going to the bookshelf, pulling [my book] out and saying, 'Who is this?' '"

Read more: Poetry opened doors wide for Eduardo Corral