I believe that all fiction is personal and all writing is at some level personal.

I am most interested in people. I try to capture their complexity and contradiction and beauty. It does not matter where they are from.

This poet is a griot in search of a village.

When people open up and share their stories, you have a responsibility to tell these truths truthfully and with the same quest for grace and beauty that you see in them.

All memory is fiction.

Maybe that is the power of poetry. It somehow transcends news cycles, and becomes a part of our collective imagination. That is the beauty of the art form I like to play with.

Latino poets, are really having a significant impact on American poetics today.

My concern is always that I can do justice to what I see and hear.

The aesthetic, as I understand it, is really about the way in which we understand beauty and speak and think about beauty.

Racist writing is a craft failure.

Our goal is to publish African poets in as many ways as possible.

The illusion that humans possess free will is compounded by the inherent randomness of the universe. Chaos disguised as freedom of choice...

An editor is someone who is paid to tell a writer what she thinks about how he wrote what he thinks about.

It's always a pleasure to find something that matters.

Trying to tell you I'm the one, come and holla at me before I'm on the next thing, YMCMB.

Every five years, I decide to learn something new.

I clean this teapot with the kind of attention I would have were I giving the baby Buddha or Jesus a bath.

How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?

If you really want to get rid of the problems in the NFL, put Obama in charge of it: in a few months it will be so deep in debt it will have to go out of business - no more concussions.

I’m just going to do what I want now, and let the chips fall where they may.