While some mothers sing lullabies to their children, my mother read me poetry. And to this day, I associate my strongest and most insistent feelings with words lyrically organized on a page.

If I cannot offer some relief to our world, if I cannot inspire our generation to join me, then I feel I am a complete waste of space. This constant fear of feeling irrelevant in our society has been the catalyst behind all my efforts and passions for as long as I can remember.

I feel every medium of art needs to heal to some degree. It can't live in it's own void, and this came from my earliest experiences as a young refugee.

My mother's only wish was to start a life in America because America was the cradle of every promise and opportunity.

It is the show that keeps giving. Every night it offers something to society, and it offered something to every one of us. It brought us all together for a lifetime.

I'm thinking like the character in order to be as authentic as I can. But after a while, how would I be able to cleanse myself from this unless I do something that's a different medium but also creative. That's what I do. It's my little ritual. After every filming, I just write a poem about it and my character specifically and I can let her go.

I'm an actress, primarily. I love to write poetry. I've been writing poetry since I was 12 years old.