Everything I write, I read out loud. It has to sound a certain way. It has to look a certain way on the page.

No matter how big you get, it's still okay to cry because everybody's got a right to their own tears.

I do believe that books can change lives and give people this kind of language they wouldn't have had otherwise.

When you think of how a child experiences a series of events, it feels, for so long, like she's looking at everything from behind this glass and it's obscured.

I think people need to remember that a book isn't done after a few rewrites and a publisher isn't going to buy an 'undone' book so the hard part is making it a book that at least ten other people want to pay for to read.

Everything I write, I read out loud. It has to sound a certain way. It has to look a certain way on the page.

As a poet who has the tools for interpreting the poem differently, you can begin to deconstruct it. But the human being who's like, "I know about conversation, I know about language, I know about hard times," will approach the poem differently.