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.

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.

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.

Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.

When God blesses you with great opportunities in life

I am a slow reader, and fast eater; I wish it were the other way around.

Sometimes I'm really dressed up, and it really turns me on

Human comedy is more profound than tragedy. In tragedy we die and it is very sad. In comedy we avoid death, and it is even sadder.

Sometimes you tell someone to never call you again; and then the phone rings and you hope it's them - it's the most twisted logic of all time.

I have crushed the cup of youth like a rose between my fingers but its nectar never warmed my weary heart.

It is so difficult to, day in and day out, hear these incredibly painful stories of the destructive nature of our broken immigration system.

Years ago I was a runway model, and I used to get laughs. I thought it was a joke anyway

It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader.