I train myself for triumph by knowing it is mine no matter what.

Without community, there is no liberation...but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.

I agreed to take part in a New York University Institute for Humanities conference a year ago. . . .

I am a Black Lesbian Feminist Warrior Poet Mother, stronger for all my identities, and I am indivisible.

[Speaking] is never without fear; of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now, that if I were to have been born mute, and had maintained an oath of silence my whole life for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die.

Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.

Pain is an event ... Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain.