Reading and thoughtfulness and openness are the best way, I should think, to begin to address the richness that is in each of us.

Schools provide safe spaces to talk about controversial issues, and literature presents characters portraying human experience in all its richness and contradictoriness.

Reading is a way to take in the difficult situations and understand them. The whole point of reading a book in class is to have discussion about what these situations are like.

As a young writer, I was on guard against the Latina in me, the Spanish in me because as far as I could see the models that were presented to me did not include my world. In fact, 'I was told by one teacher in college that one could only write poetry in the language in which one first said Mother. That left me out of American literature, for sure.

It's like my whole world is coming undone, but when I write, my pencil is a needle and thread, and I'm stitching the scraps back together.

How we lie to ourselves when we've fallen in love with the wrong man.

I grew up in a dictatorship, where you couldn't talk about difficult situations - there was this culture of silence. We would run into a problem and have no one to talk to.