Diversity is about all of us, and about us having to figure out how to walk through this world together.

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.

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.

Seems like every time life starts straightening itself out, something's gotta go and happen.

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

Racism doesn't know color, death doesn't know age, and pain doesn't know might.

I'm always wondering if he'll return. Sometimes I pray that he doesn't. And sometimes I hope he will. I wish on falling stars and eyelashes. Absence isn't solid the way death is. It's fluid, like language. And it hurts so much...so, so much.