One of the blessings and curses of my life is that I carry so many projects at the same time.

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.

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.

For lack of knowledge of the Holy One, we perish in sin of hell.

Today's effort is the strength for tomorrow

Remember that when you say ‘I will have none of this exile and this stranger for his face is not like my face and his speech is strange, ’ you have denied America with that word.

Who in their infinite wisdom decreed that Little League uniforms be white? Certainly not a mother.

The law courts must appear as a threatening gesture toward secret vice. The bank must declare: here your money is secure and well looked after by honest people.

I'm shameless, and I love a pun. There's a lot of Beth puns.

The only pressure I ever feel is the pressure I put on myself... I'm over it. Now I go out there and I enjoy what I do.

There's no place you can go on the prairie that you don't hear the white noise of the wind, steady and rough as surf curling along a non-existant shore.

I can assure you full immunity is not on the table. But your hand is.