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 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.

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

My concern is always that I can do justice to what I see and hear.

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.

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.

The rich and complex history of South Carolina is the history of the African diaspora, and in many ways, I felt acutely the sense of this collective memory of migration, suffering and transformation while living in South Carolina.