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

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

I loved and still love watching words flower into sentences and sentences blossom into stories.

We do inherently know that poetry is about the way we speak. It's about where we pause, where we drop our words in the middle of a sentence. It's about the rhythm and the cadence of the way we speak. It's about putting that down at the end of the day.

Keep on doing what you're doing.

I have met women who don't have close women friends, and I've always been like, "How could that possibly be?"

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