All memory is fiction.

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.

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.

Just cuz you get to the end doesn’t mean you know what happened.

You don’t create your thoughts, but you choose your thoughts. To pick the right thoughts at a right time is what wisdom is all about.

We parked our bikes on verges so they could graze.

Education is key. I graduated from high school everyone needs to.

God is not necessary to create culpability, or to punish. Our fellow men are enough for that, helped by ourselves.

My choice is what I choose to be.

The studied, unquestioning pace of my family irritated me.

Each of us can, by ploy or gambit, most naturally gain the advantage.

It is never wrong to fight for what is right, never!

In the dark times, if you have something to hold on to, which is yourself, you'll survive.