Imagine a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet suffering from dyslexia without knowing it until he was 58 years old, being unable to return phone calls on his answering machine because he couldn’t hear the phone numbers correctly. Imagine this poet as a boy, having big trouble reading, thinking up a character who, unlike himself, could plow through books—as the dyslexic boy somehow taught himself to read by inventing a literate persona, an alter ego who loved books and wanted to be a writer.

Meet Philip Schultz, the founder and director of the nationally renowned New York–based Writers Studio, who teaches classes in poetry and fiction writing rooted in the concept that writers invent personas to look into their hearts and speak for themselves—much as Shakespeare invented Hamlet and Salinger invented Holden Caulfield.

Schultz is finishing up a memoir, “My Dyslexia,” which will recount how he grew up back when the term “dyslexia” had no name; how, because of his poor reading skills, he failed to be promoted for a couple of years in grade school; and how his efforts and enormous gifts as a writer resulted in his 2008 Pulitzer Prize for a poetry book called “Failure.”

Best of all, this hour-long interview features Schultz reading several poems from his brand-new book, “The God of Loneliness: Selected and New Poems.” If you love poems as I do, you may appreciate an early beaut’, “For My Father,” which begins: “Spring we went into the heat of lilacs / & his black eyes got big as onions & his fat lower lip / hung like a bumper. . . .” Or you may cotton to the opening lines of a major life-affirming portrait of Greenwich Village characters who seem to bounce straight out of a Saul Bellow novel, in Schultz’s “The Adventures of 78 Charles Street”: “For thirty-two years Patricia Parmelee’s yellow light / has burned all night / in her kitchen down the hall in 2E. / Patricia—I love to say her name—Par-me-lee!”

I love this interview, so I’ll say the name of its interviewee again: Philip Schultz.