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.

I do bring my teaching together with my writing. I make students write in class, and do the same prompts I give them. I'm always on the lookout for teaching poems - poems that inspire me and my students to write poems in response.

In terms of what I write about, I consider no subject too small. Often it's the small moments, that through the amplification of poetry, reveal the larger, more profound truths that we all come to recognize and treasure.

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.

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?

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.