Mama says it's okay to be on the quiet side—if quiet means you're listening, watching, taking it all in.

I don't know how women stop being friends with other women.

That's what makes best friends. It's not whether or not you live on the same block or go to the same school, but how you feel about each other in your hearts.

I think that happens for a lot of people, they have this idea that there's only one type of way to write poetry and that you have to have this information. You have to know about meter, you have to know about form, you have to know about iambic pentameter, and all of that.

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.

I think I had gotten messages really young that poetry wasn't for me, that it was for, basically, some dead white men. My experience and my intellect was on the outside of understanding that. I think that's what's so destructive.

Mama says it's okay to be on the quiet side—if quiet means you're listening, watching, taking it all in.