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Interview with Lucille Lang Day
Poet, writer, and science and health educator, Lucille Lang Day, lives in Oakland, California. She has authored or edited 21 books and is a contributor to over 60 anthologies. As a poet and writer, she is best known for her award-winning memoir, ‘Married at Fourteen: A True Story’, for her integration of science imagery and concepts into poetry and for advocating the use of poetry as a tool in environmental activism. As a science and health educator, her many achievements have included promoting science education for girls and serving as co-director of Health and Biomedical Science for a Diverse Community, a project that was funded by the National Institutes of Health with the aim of making biomedical science more accessible to under-represented minorities.
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Lucy, you married at age 14, gave birth to your first child at age 15 and then went on to earn a B.A. in biological sciences, an M.A. in zoology and a Ph.D. in science and mathematics education all from the University of California, Berkeley. How did you find the time and the energy to achieve all this with such distinction, after such an unconventional and early entry into adulthood?
My unconventional adolescence showed me the importance of education in fulfilling all of one’s goals, including career, financial, relationship, and artistic goals. I dropped out of school after eighth grade, but I had to lie and say I’d completed tenth grade to get a position requiring even the most minimal of skills. When I was 16, I worked as a phone girl at Chicken Delight, a precursor to DoorDash, which delivered hot chicken dinners to households in the San Francisco East Bay area. Need I say it was not fun, rewarding, or lucrative to answer the phone at Chicken Delight or staple napkins and packets of salt to the lids of paper plates when the phone wasn’t ringing? Then, when I was 17, I had a stint as a gas station attendant. Not wanting to be a phone girl or gas station attendant for the rest of my life resulted in great enthusiasm for books and learning. Going back to school took no more energy than standing on my feet all day for $1.25 an hour and was way more interesting. I wanted to be a writer and scientist, make more money, and date guys who had graduated from high school, so I set my sights on college. My mother stepped in to take care of my daughter when I attended classes or needed to study, and her help was essential.
Your memoir, ‘Married at Fourteen: A True Story’ (Heyday, 2012), received a 2013 PEN Oakland / Josephine Miles Literary award and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in Creative Non-fiction. What motivated you to write the book and what do you hope your readers will take from it?
I wanted to tell my story of teen marriage and motherhood for several reasons. One was that it is a cautionary tale. I thought that marrying, having a child, and catapulting myself into adulthood would make my life easier, but I found that it was harder to work at a low-paying job and take care of a child the rest of the time than it had been to study my schoolbooks and do my homework. Another motivating factor was to break stereotypes about teen mothers and juvenile delinquents. People who have a turbulent adolescence such as mine are sometimes regarded as emotionally unstable, lacking in potential, and/or not very bright. I wanted to provide a counter-example showing that such kids might in fact have the same potential as anyone else. Finally, I wanted simply to tell a story, to examine my younger self as one would a character in a novel and show how I matured and evolved.
Much, if not all, of your working life has been science-related, working as a math / science specialist, teaching chemistry and biology, and working as a science writer, administrator, and manager of pre-college education programs. How has the science-related work influenced and shaped your work as a poet?
Science and poetry require many of the same skills and cognitive processes, including careful observation, trial and error, and openness to the unexpected. Plus, science provides a cornucopia of images and ideas for poetry. I have written poems that touch on such things as the inflation theory of the origin of the universe, multiple universes, the Big Bang, the Big Crunch, and the mathematics of chaos and infinity, as well as vertebrate evolution, invasive species, DNA structure, and the function of mitochondria in providing the energy required by living organisms.
You also hold an M.A. in English and an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. To what extent do you think that creative writing can be taught?
It can’t be taught directly. We each have to find our own voice and subject matter, and no one can tell us how to do this. That being said, I think academic programs in creative writing are extremely valuable in helping writers to develop. At SF State, I read work by writers I might otherwise never have heard of, tried approaches to writing that I would otherwise never have thought of, and got feedback that enabled me to see how people interpreted, understood, and sometimes misunderstood my poetry. It was very enlightening to engage in deep, detailed discussions of my own work and that of others.
In 1999, you founded a small press publishing imprint called Scarlet Tanager Books (https:// scarlettanager.com) which publishes poetry, fiction, and literary non-fiction by West Coast writers. What motivated you to set this up and how is it faring now?
At readings and in workshops, I kept hearing extraordinary poems and stories whose authors were having a hard time finding publishers for their books. I thought, What a pity that such wonderful work is not getting out into the world. And then, I can do this, I can publish some of these books! Also, at first I thought I could do a better job than other small presses in promoting the books that I published. This turned out to be a delusion of grandeur. I have worked hard at it, but I don’t believe I’ve done any better than other small presses in drawing attention to the books I’ve published.
I’m very proud of the most recent Scarlet Tanager title, the anthology ‘Convergence: Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War’, which came out in May 2026. The 23rd book published by Scarlet Tanager, it was edited by poets Anne Coray, J. C. Todd, and Teresa Mei Chuc. With wars raging in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran, this book is timely, and it has received great reviews in North American Review, Close Encounters in War Journal, Veterans for Peace Newsletter, Consequence Forum, and Homer Independent Press. After 27 years, though, I am now ready to take a break from Scarlet Tanager in order to focus, at least for the time being, on my own work.
Tell us a little bit about your latest book, ‘The Cosmos and Me: New and Selected Poems’ (Trio House Press, 2026). What made you settle on that title and do the poems contained in the eight themed sections cover common ground?
‘The Cosmos and Me’ contains poems from my previously published seven full-length poetry collections and four chapbooks, as well as new poems not included in the earlier books. I selected the poems in Cosmos from ones I’d written over a period of about 50 years, from 1974 to 2024. Each of the eight sections has a particular focus that proceeds logically from the previous section: 1) the universe, 2) the Earth and its ecosystems, 3) climate change, pollution, extinction, and other environmental issues, 4) human ancestors, including my own, 5) autobiography, 6) my family and mortality, 7) the broader human community, and 8) the pandemic, political uncertainty, and the present moment in my life.
You converted to Judaism in 1974. In what ways does your faith inform your writing?
The rabbi I studied with thought of God as the Grand Unified Theory (GUT), in which all the forces of the universe are fused into a single, unified force. Albert Einstein included the weak force, the strong force, electromagnetism, and gravity in his attempts at unification. Modern GUTs, however, leave out gravity. So far, physicists have both theoretically and experimentally demonstrated unification of the weak force and electromagnetism, but have not yet succeeded in including the strong force, which binds atomic nuclei. Thus, like God, the Grand Unified Theory remains a mystery. This mystery, which is compatible with and interwoven with scientific findings and explanations, forms the basis of my own spirituality and adds an element of the unknown and unknowable to my writing.
What books / authors influenced you as a young writer? Which ones do you enjoy reading now?
As a teenager, I was drawn to the Romantics, especially Shelley and Keats, and their heirs, including Dickinson, Frost, and Millay. With the work of these poets lodged in my head, I wrote mostly poems with traditional rhyme schemes and meter. Then, after joining the Berkeley Poets Co-op in 1972, I fell in love with the Imagist poets, especially William Carlos Williams, and Confessional poets such as Sexton, Plath, and Lowell, and I started writing free verse. More recently, I’ve found myself in tune with contemporary poets whose work reflects deep connections to science and nature, including Pattiann Rogers, Alison Hawthorne Deming, and Lisa Rosenberg.
Apart from writing, are you able to make time for other interests?
I have always tried to live my life fully. In addition to writing, I enjoy reading, movies, art exhibits, music, hiking, and spending time with family and friends. I can’t do all of these things every week, but I do some of them!
What are you working on at the moment and what are your plans for the future?
Right now I’m working mostly on getting the word out about ‘The Cosmos and Me’, but I plan to pull together a collection of my short stories and personal essays in the near future. Also, I have continued to write poetry since ‘The Cosmos and Me’ was accepted for publication. Many of my newer poems are lists, so I envision doing a chapbook of list poems, and more and more often lately, I find myself wanting to write about political issues. Every day I read something in the newspaper that I want to jump up and scream about!
Here’s a list poem from ‘The Cosmos and Me’:
I Am Amazed
For Susan Duhan Felix
By the Arches Cluster, the most
crowded place in the Milky Way,
jam-packed with stars, 25,000
light-years from Earth in Sagittarius
By Earth, whirling through space,
the only planet known to have
free oxygen, liquid water, whales,
wallabies and redwood forests
By a single redwood tree, 350
feet tall and ten feet in diameter,
standing above the Pacific
since Herod was exiled to Gaul
By a single redwood needle, flat,
with two silvery bands on its
underside and inner machinery
endlessly churning out ATP
By a molecule of ATP, which
carries energy in all the cells
of people and trees, a currency
required for love and breathing
By two children, a boy and a girl,
playing under the tree, who spot
a speckled woodpecker with a red
patch on its head, tapping the bark,
igniting a blaze of amazement
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