This poet is a griot in search of a village.

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

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.

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

Don't waste your energy trying to change opinions ... Do your thing, and don't care if they like it.

She knew all about love—that beautiful, exquisitely painful but precious journey.

You never know how long it will take. The route to success is unpredictable. So pack the essentials: parcels of love and peace, packets of patience and hope, and bundles of perseverance!

To know true love, even though it was impossible to keep, had finally cracked her heart open enough to let someone else in.

The French have a passion for revolution but an abhorrence of change.

It is important for us to remember that black people have been patriotic and have fought for that American dream in every American war.

Golf was my life. I didn't want to give it up. So I went to work!

How many things in the world deserve our loyalty? Very few indeed. I think one should be loyal to immortality, which is another word for life, a stronger word for it.

Its hard to measure yourself if nobody is challenging you.

No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Reethoven's Ninth, Rartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Reatles' White Album?