Latino poets, are really having a significant impact on American poetics today.

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.

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.

Proper deformity shows not in the fiendSo horrid as in woman.

It is not about proving anything to the world. It is all about proving your capabilities to yourself and stretching your own boundaries.

I am, " I saidTo no one thereAn no one heard at allNot even the chair"I am, " I cried"I am, " said IAnd I am lost, and I can't even say whyLeavin' me lonely still

Writing the story of their own life allows the author to parse their story into examinable segments while continuing to engage in the act of communion and creation.

I love a book which never ends in my head, even though- a thousand times, it has been read!

Acting without thinking is like shooting without aiming.

I think that the religious and the military right wings are just two sides of the same coin if somebody uses God and religion and somebody uses country and security.

The Obama foreign policy, in broad strokes, has been a disaster.

My best game plan is to sit on the bench and call out specific instructions like 'C'mon Boog,' 'Get a hold of one, Frank,' or 'Let's go, Brooks.'

How can you lose something you never had, I tell myself when I'm feeling sad.