The astonishing news culminated a crazy week in Wales, and it punctuated five years of writing, anxiety, war, and motherhood for Fenton, now 30, whose husband, Peenesh Shah, was deployed to Iraq as a medic.
"The full spectacle of all this is just starting to dawn on me," Fenton said by phone from the rowhouse (actually, her brother's - more on that in a minute) in Philadelphia. "When I got home, I thought I'd just change diapers, hire a babysitter . . . not have 150 e-mails."
She was in Wales because she and the other five finalists for the award were part of a teaching program. "The Dylan Thomas people have all the finalists live in the same place for a week before announcing the winner," Fenton said. The finalists visit schools and teach the kids. "The reception was amazing," she said. "The students were wide-eyed and well-prepared, and the community of writers was absolutely wonderful. We stayed in the house of Dylan Thomas' birth. My 10-month-old daughter Mira slept in the room in which he was born."
She took her daughter to Wales with her? "Yes," Fenton said, laughing. "My mother and father came with us. I couldn't have done it unless they'd taken a babysitting vacation in Wales."
Fenton, a very accomplished poet, might resist the hackneyed word romantic. But there is a crazy romance in her life since about 2005 - love, war, poetry, two people ranging from Oregon to Texas to Iraq to Philadelphia to Wales.
