This poet is a griot in search of a village.

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

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.

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

I have dear friends in South Carolina, folks who made my life there wonderful and meaningful. Two of my children were born there. South Carolina's governor awarded me the highest award for the arts in the state. I was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors. I have lived and worked among the folks in Sumter, South Carolina, for so many years. South Carolina has been home, and to be honest, it was easier for me to define myself as a South Carolinian than even as an American.