Social media is alluring, tempting, frustrating, etc. We mistake our interactions in social media as community, but is community possible when you don't even know what someone looks like or what his or her voice sounds like? I've enjoyed connecting with a lot of poets through social media, but do I truly know them if I haven't even met them yet?

Poetry is such an ancient art, and I consider myself young within that art.

I write to be recorder, observer, participant, and sometimes, even judge. I want to engage the world as I see it with my whole self - all of those different aspects of it.

I think that the people who really accomplish things in this world have to have a little bit of crazy in them.

I switch between fixed forms and free verse often, and enjoy being a poet who can "swing both ways," so to speak.

Young poets worry that their experiences - whether urban or rural, immigrant or native, small town, suburb, or big city - aren't worthy of the written word. But for me the urge toward poetry, that seductive feeling of being swept away by words, was enough for me to overcome that fear that my experiences weren't worthy of poetry itself.

It's fun to see someone grow as a writer, moving from their first workshopped poems to publishing their earliest poems to having a book accepted for publication. It's great to see poets with persistence succeed.