It is the black poet who bridges the gap in tradition, who modifies tradition when experience demands it, who translates experience into meaning and meaning into belief.

Very few, if any, first-generation black or white or Asian kids will pursue a Ph.D. They'll pursue the professions for economic security. Many will go to law school and/or business school.

I'm a tech geek. Whenever I read about something new, I think to myself, How can I take this and make it black?

In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black. In Brazil, it's almost as if one drop of white ancestry makes you white.

I think literacy is everything.

That's what I mean by being bilingual: comfortable in your skin, comfortable with all parts of who you are.

I want to be black, to know black, to luxuriate in whatever I might be calling blackness at any particular time, but to do so in order to come out on the other side, to experience a humanity that is neither colorless nor reducible to color.