“I found myself writing from the perspective of the kid that I used to be, trying to figure out a basic question: Am I supposed to be here?” Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr. talks about the difficulties he experienced as a gay teacher in Appalachia and what inspired his debut collection, Gay Poems for Red States (University of Kentucky Press, 2023), which is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, in this interview for WTVQ-TV in Lexington, Kentucky.