When people open up and share their stories, you have a responsibility to tell these truths truthfully and with the same quest for grace and beauty that you see in them.

Racist writing is a craft failure.

There is no access to contemporary poetry in the libraries.

Rick Black writes with the honed elegance of a poet so in command of lyric sentiment and the efficient evocative use of language that what results is indeed as urgent and vulnerable as true prayer ... There is something profoundly human and completely necessary about Star of David.

I believe that many lives around us now can reflect this strange pattern of migration and movement. The question is: are we aware of it, and do we embrace it as a kind of birthright? I do. And yet, I feel deeply connected to at least two homespaces - Jamaica and Ghana, and more recently, South Carolina.

The aesthetic, as I understand it, is really about the way in which we understand beauty and speak and think about beauty.

This poet is a griot in search of a village.