My experiences there truly defined who I am to this day as far as my humanitarian work because I was a refugee in Albania.

I would much rather sit, dimmed by inattention, and study the atmosphere and the silence and dance between people, but often times I’m not offered this privilege. The necessity for isolation, and the striving for popularity is the only contradiction I find in being a writer and an actress.

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

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.

English was my fourth language. I arrived, I enrolled in public school, as a child, I believe I was about six years old when we finally landed in Michigan. And I was initially put in special education because I couldn't quite wrap my mind around the English language because I was listening to Hungarian and Albanian and German. My mind broke down like I couldn't quite wrap my mind around the fourth language.

I'm not religious, and I feel that has to do with me being uprooted so many times in my life that I've explored many religions and sentiments from many different families basically across the globe.

There's always an added element of a poem when it's read aloud because then you can really hear the rhythm, and the cadence, and even the pronunciation sometimes adds another layer to the poem.