If you're just mired in privilege, there's nothing to learn; learning appears to be over.

If you're just mired in privilege, there's nothing to learn; learning appears to be over.

Eliot said that "genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." What he meant by that is, the emotional understanding comes before you understand the argument that follows later in the text.

Much of the visualizing is imaginative.

I'm interested in someone who's mired in grief: how do you get back to that thing that makes them warm? Because you know that's in there.

Because I write intuitively and image-by-image and moment-by-moment, my writing has to be powered by feelings and emotions.

My grandfather is Portuguese. He betrayed what was expected of him and married my grandmother of African descent on my father's side.