What do the 20th-century American Catholic writers Flannery O'Connor and Frank O'Hara have to do with Rumi, the 13th-century Persian Muslim poet?
For Brad Gooch, who has written biographies of all three, quite a lot.
"In my mind, if you put together Flannery O'Connor and Frank O'Hara, you get Rumi," Gooch said in an interview from his home in New York. "Rumi was a spontaneous poet whose work came out of his friendships, who had a larger-than-life relation to poetry, and that reminded me of Frank, while Flannery, like Rumi, puts theology and religion at the center of her work."
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