In a finding that has left her professors “astounded,” a previously unknown interview with Walt Whitman has been discovered by an undergraduate at the College of New Jersey in Trenton. Nicole Kukawski, 21, was conducting research for a paper on the poet when she found the school’s student newspaper had interviewed him in 1888. As an Associated Press wire story reports, Kukawski was trying “to try to learn about what students at the time” thought about the writer, who lived in nearby Camden, and was surprised to discover that two student reporters for the school’s The Signal had interviewed Whitman on the subject of “the education of a writer.” Kukawski has been invited to present the resultant paper at the college’s upcoming symposium on the 150th anniversary of the publication of Leaves of Grass, which coincides with the anniversary of the college itself. As for what Whitman had to say about the education of a writer: “Whack away at everything pertaining to literary life — the mechanical part as well as the rest. Learn to set type, learn to work at the ‘case,’ learn to be a practical printer, and whatever you do learn condensation.” But, he said, “First, don’t write poetry; second ditto; third ditto.”