Racist writing is a craft failure.

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.

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

It's not the speed that will help you succeed. It's the right DIRECTION.

Then if children make so much trouble, why do people have 'em?

Wherever you go, wherever you stay - there is eternity.

Just as God expressed his great love by giving his son to die for our redemption, so we will express our love for God by giving to others

I still think of myself as from Illinois.

The message of love is self-acceptance in the smaller sense and self-acceptance in the large sense - the Self as eternity.

I'm never going to run this again.

The internet has been incredible in regards to the selling of my CD. I don't know how it's affected or will affect my acting career.

Dancing in Tijuana when I was 13 — that was my 'summer camp.' How else do you think I could keep up with Fred Astaire when I was 19?

If you haven't got it, you can't show it. If you have got it, you can't hide it.