Poet Laureate, Baron Wormser, has just released his long-awaited new novel, Teach Us That Peace. With wit, empathy and honesty Wormser captures the power and fragility of the human spirit in 1963 when racial harmony was becoming more than an American dream. He says, “The question in all my work is ‘What is it to be human?’ We tend to take that for granted but we shouldn’t. Humanity is an aspiration, not a given. A King or Mandela or Robert Kennedy knew that. Of course we are confused creatures who are all muddling through but we can be honest about that and share that and have a sense of humor about that.” There feels throughout this book a climaxing wave of emotion and purpose fraught with ignorance, yet pulsating with hope that everyone can feel but no one quite understands captured in lines like, “she didn’t know where she was headed but she was headed somewhere.” He is speaking of a very particular time in our history but the mood of an impending need for change could easily describe the feeling today. “I wrote the 1963 part of the book, which is about hope in part, but also about people talking to one another and trying to listen to one another. When people ask me what the book is about, I say it’s about white and black people starting to talk to one another. As long as people are talking to one another, there is hope. When people aren’t talking to one another–and the annals of that are extensive and bleak–it’s hope against hope?…”