It'll be revenge, of a sort, when Roanoke native K. Kamal Ayyildiz returns to his North Cross School alma mater tonight to read from his forthcoming book of poetry, "The Cistern."

As an elementary schooler with severe dyslexia, he regularly brought home F papers. As a teenager, he accumulated the most demerits in the school's history.

"It's almost a coup for me to be coming back to North Cross because I was pigeonholed early on as being too outspoken," the 37-year-old said Friday from his parents' Hunting Hills home. "I was often late and disheveled, but I also spoke my mind.

"What was primarily a kid trying to articulate and communicate was more often than not interpreted as someone trying to be belligerent."

His forthcoming book, a collection of narrative poems, explores the promises and perils of life in a cross-cultural world. Ayyildiz's father, Dr. Vedii Ayyildiz, immigrated to the United States from Turkey at the age of 34 - with $50 in his pocket. His West Virginia-born mother, writer Judy Light Ayyildiz, taught creative writing in area schools for decades.

Throughout Kamal's upbringing, the family vacationed regularly in Istanbul. From an early age, he remembers dictating songs and poems and stories in the back of his parents' station wagon during those trips, his mother writing it all down in her journal.

Now a freelance writer and poet living in Manhattan, Kamal spoke about diversity, dyslexia and why the American culture wars keep his keyboard humming.

How did your Turkish-American heritage influence your view of diversity?

From a young age, traveling back and forth to Turkey, I always knew there were different countries and religions, and that love could move beyond all that. Most kids didn't grow up seeing a mosque or going to acity like Istanbul that sits on two continents. ... When my father first went to open a practice in Roanoke, there were doctors who tried to push him out because he was a foreigner. He had to open his first clinic in Salem - not because Salem was this bastion of liberalism but because Salem was in more need of general surgeons at the time.

If my father made a mistake as a foreign physician, there would have been no recovery from it.

Were you personally discriminated against?

I've been fortunate to have a great education and opportunity in my life. But at the same time I can remember being terrified by the KKK as a child. We'd be driving down through South Carolina to the beach in the family station wagon, and I'd lay in the back of the car every time a car would come up and pass us. I was scared they'd realize my father was a foreigner and that we weren't prejudiced people, and that we could be killed.

You went by your first name, Kevin, as a student at North Cross. Why did you change to Kamal?

My family has always called me by my middle name, Kamal, and about 10 years ago I went back to being called Kamal [pronounced Ka-MALL] by everyone.

But in second grade I had to start going by Kevin because my teachers would call me "Camel." I literally went in with a note one day that said, "Kamal is no longer to be Kamal; please call him Kevin."

Remember, it was Roanoke in 1975. And my last name's Ayyildiz, and they already felt put out by that. Now, fortunately, you do see an acceptance just on that basic level that didn't exist here when I was a kid.

In this divisive time, what lessons can your experiences impart?

There's a tremendous amount of ignorance flowing through the U.S. media and government these days about the [Middle] East and Eastern people. It's a lot easier to reject something you consider foreign than to go through the self-examination that it takes to accept differences. As an artist, I have a responsibility and a medium to question society and my own life in order to push my work forward.

What do you think of the notion that we're engaged in a culture war in America?

I think that acceptance of differences is the greatest liberty of all, whether it's cultural, religious or sexual choice. In reality I think most people are not trying to perpetuate aggression against other people; right now that seems to be a popular myth. For most people it's a struggle just to live this life, just to survive.

Most people, if you sit them down in a room together, they have a shared dignity. But it's taking the time to make that communication happen that's important. Right now, fear is what's being prominently brokered in American society.

Talk about your dyslexia and how it hindered and/or helped you as an artist.

As a dyslexic kid in the '70s, I could turn in a paper and get it back and get a 60 because I'd misspelled 40 words. But it wasn't based on the content I was providing. I really felt defeated. If you couldn't spell a word, how could you absorb a sentence?

Writing poetry gave me my first access to the language. And eventually I learned ways of coping with it.

Although I can say now, looking back, that it has helped with my creativity - by giving me another way of perceiving the world - as a kid I spent many afternoons with tutors and I never got to take break time in school because it took me so long to do my work.

How important is it for students to be exposed to professional artists in the schools?

The most important thing the North Cross Book Fair did for me was it brought in established writers who were professionals and leaders. Being a writer was brought to the surface for me at a very young age. ... As a kid, I would not have survived without the arts. And even as an adult, when I'm in a crisis, it's my creativity that allows me to rise above it.

What are you writing now?

My next book is about growing up in Virginia, and it has a lot to do with the civil rights movement and the phenomenal children and young adults in the movement who did things and walked through tremendous barriers. ... I've been doing a lot of reading on the civil rights movement because of the current politics of our nation. I'm trying to take my work deeper into these questions of diversity.'

Song of Dost

'My father had a dog,

he said it died when he sailed for New York.

I always imagined it left on the dock

not turning into a tree

or a flower.

The world hurts

and against the rocking

a prayer breaks from loudspeakers.

A man, who is slowly roasting corn for a child,

is attached to his cart like the land to the water.

He watches with the dog as the wake

cuts against the shore.

And I think I have trusted him,

he sells a knowledge of a beloved world.

Moving distant and loyal the wake

spreads out as some swirling peacock's tail.

But my father's dog was a good boy,

Dad ordered him to stay,

resigned him to drowning on shore.

My father left those lovely calls and commands,

he loves he was able to leave.

He said the dog died of a sadness.

It was him or the dog.

He loves that dog.

His name was Dost.

- from "The Cistern," by K. Kamal