Christina Ama Ata Aidoo, a visiting poet at Brown University from Ghana, reads and discusses her work yesterday at Bridgham Middle School.

The Providence Journal / Kris Craig

Bridgham students Elia Campeon and Katherine Giron listen to Christina Ama Ata Aidoo read from one of her collections. She is a visiting poet from Ghana at Brown University.

PROVIDENCE — An eighth-grade boy sidles up to Christina Ama Ata Aidoo, a renowned African playwright, poet, novelist and critic. By now, the author has finished speaking at Samuel Bridgham Middle School and the library has emptied.

“What do you write for fun?” Jeremy Paz asks shyly.

“I always write for fun,” says Aidoo, who is wearing a traditional Ghanaian skirt and top made of waxed prints. “My only regret is that I don’t give myself enough time to write as much as I’d like.”

Aidoo teases more information out of Jeremy, discovering that he, too, likes to write stories.

“Are your stories based on your own life” he says, inching a little closer to the famous author, winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for African Literature and a visiting professor at Brown University.

Not really, Aidoo says. She tells Jeremy that each of her characters is drawn from dozens of people she has met or known. “That way,” she jokes, “no one can sue me.”

Then, Jeremy asks Aidoo to name her favorite author.

“Oh, I don’t have one,” Aidoo says. “Let me see. Shakespeare, Toni Morrison, Pablo Neruda.”

Aidoo asks Jeremy what he likes to read and he says that his latest favorite is a book called The Girl Who Owned A City, a futuristic tale in which everyone over 13 dies of a mysterious virus, leaving the children to remake the world. Aidoo writes down the title and says, “I shall have to look for that one.”

Aidoo encourages Jeremy to write every day. She urges him to ignore the naysayers, the people who tell you that writing is no way to earn a living.

“Some day, Jeremy,” she says, “I might pick up your book and say, ‘I knew that writer when he was a middle school student.’ ”

Aidoo was invited to speak at Bridgham yesterday because the principal, Dinah Larbi, studied literature with her at the University of Cape Coast in Ghana.

“I remember how lively she was,” Larbi says. “She was always smiling, always animated. Coming from Ghana as I did, she made me feel that, as a woman, I could do anything.”

Surrounded by 60 children, Aidoo reads a short story called The Girl Who Can, about a young African girl who was born with very long, thin legs. Her grandmother keeps telling her that girls should have strong legs to support their hips, so they can bear strong children. One day, the little girl competed in a foot race at school. Thanks to her long legs, she won Best Junior Athlete, complete with a silver cup. As her grandmother carried the gleaming silver cup home, she began crying:

“Who knew,” the grandmother said, “that such thin legs could also be useful, that these legs could run?”

Next, Aidoo reads a children’s poem in which the earth is asked to choose which she likes better: night or day.

“I love you both

Don’t make me choose.

I like the color of the day

I like the silence of the night.”

Afterward, Aidoo talks about how she got hooked on books:

“Here I was, living in a Third World country, but I was in luck. I had a cousin who was a teacher and his house was full of books. In Ghana, I read Dracula. You know, the count who drank people’s blood. I met him a long time ago in Africa.”

As a child, she was an indiscriminate reader, devouring Tennyson and Jane Austen, adventure stories and romance novels. But Aidoo didn’t realize that she wanted to be a writer until a teacher asked her what she wanted to do when she grew up. Without a moment’s hesitation, she said, “I want to be a poet.”

Later, that teacher gave her an old typewriter. Nearly 50 years later, she’s still writing.