For decades Hilda Raz has been Editor-in-Chief of what is perhaps the most venerable literary quarterly in the Midwest, “Prairie Schooner.” More than 40 years ago when Raz’s predecessor, Bernice Slote, first accepted one of my poems for “Prairie Schooner,” I treated myself to a schooner of beer. I won’t mention how I uproariously celebrated my second acceptance from Slote.

Raz joins the ranks of topnotch writers interviewed in “New Letters on the Air.” It’s good to hear her cheery voice chirp about a somber subject, her daughter Sarah’s becoming a transsexual, changing her name to Aaron and becoming a scientist, not a poet like Raz. It’s also bracing to hear Raz speak about her son John’s heart condition, a hole in his heart, in the same spot as Raz’s breast cancer.

The sangfroid of a woman who has survived what could be catastrophes—and, in D.H. Lawrence’s words, has “come through”—emerges here. Raz has continued to be drawn as a writer to poetry. In some of the simplest, most effective words I’ve heard she expresses her passion for poems: “I love the line break. I love the push of an extended syntax from one long sentence through several, many many lines to see how long I can sustain it. I love the kind of toolkit that poets have to. . .shape their thoughts.”

Best of all, she reads a few of her own poems. My favorite, “Dishes,” describes an episode when she was pregnant. After a dinner of fresh lobster salad, she and a woman friend do the dishes, then go skinny-dipping, “Calling across a widening surface of silver water, calling and whispering and calling, ‘Sister, sister.’”