Bethany Collins

A Poet's Tale, which tells the story of Inauguration Day 2009, where I read the poem that President Barack Obama commissioned for me to read at his inaugural.

There is a painting by Bethany Collins called Thy Name I Love, My Country 'Tis of Thee.

And if you look at it very closely, it is the words from the hymn about the nation, but it's sort of erupting into sparks and sparkle and abstraction into something new.

In the chapter My Refugee that I mentioned, my late husband, Fikre Ghebreyesus, was a painter, and there is a painting by him called Portrait of a Boy, and that painting is a self-portrait of himself as a teenager, the age that he came and left his home and came first to Sudan, then to Italy, then to Germany, and then to the United States as a refugee.