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

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.

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

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

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.

Really, I'm trying to care, Artemis, really. But I thought it was all supposed to be over when the fat lady sings. Well, she's singing, but it doesn't appear to be over

This wasn't a person, Zuzana thought, this was greed wearing skin.

I still love following and thinking about politics. I enjoy recommending important journalism I read or see from other sources.

I love Australia - I think.

My anxieties have anxieties.

I am not allowing myself to get carried away.

I've never had guys sit me down and say this is what you've got to do. It's my personality that makes me one of a kind, and I believe that.

Sometimes I'll start a sentence and I don't know where it's going. I just hope to find it somewhere along the way. Like an improv conversation. An improversation.

A strenuous soul hates cheap success.