As you may know, my motto is: "All memory is fiction." It could just as easily be: "All fiction is memory." Unpacked, these two statements defy the ease of logic, but offer some really important truths about narrative art, at the very least, and about memory. So I would say that all art is personal.

I am a black person. I come out of an experience of exile and migration. I have always felt myself to be at once at home and away from home at the same time. It is inevitable that my perspective will be international.

I believe that all fiction is personal and all writing is at some level personal.

I am most interested in people. I try to capture their complexity and contradiction and beauty. It does not matter where they are from.

In reggae I have a model of artistic excellence and possibility that is challenging and inspiring. The poem remains a demanding thing - an object to be understood and shaped into my own sense of self, the same is true of the play, the novel, the short story. Yet, for some reason, I approach these existing genres with the kind of confidence that the reggae artist approaches any song floating around out there.

I think that the kinds of stereotypes that people have about Haitians or about HIV sufferers exist because we don't realize that these are our brothers, our sisters, our aunts and uncles, our neighbors. They are us. And I don't mean that in some metaphorical sense. They are literally us.

Maybe that is the power of poetry. It somehow transcends news cycles, and becomes a part of our collective imagination. That is the beauty of the art form I like to play with.