Hard times are really a fire under your ass to prioritize and think, "Okay, how can I challenge myself to put something in the world that wasn't there that can reach other folks and help them to process?"

Where I would usually backspace, I stop and say, "You know what? This is important, that I say how I feel and don't sugarcoat it, and don't avoid it."

Sometimes it's just rejecting stereotypes, sometimes it's creating work. Sometimes it's just blocking out the noise.

So much of the world and the systems that we live within are made to keep us from feeling like we're free. The way that black women in American came to be is just diametrically opposed to being free.

After a while, being so honest and so vulnerable on the page ends up affecting my own kind of self possession in the world, because I am not afraid of myself and my own thoughts. I think so much of being a woman, of being a social being, of being polite, is quieting those thoughts. There's so much we try not to say as we go through the day. There's a lot of tempering and self-editing. It is a relief to make writing that space where I don't need to do that.

I try to convey what it feels like and sounds like and smells like and looks like inside of my particular skin, to move through the world as a black American woman in her mid-twenties.

I think that fear came from, "Okay, I'm going to have Beyoncé in the title, and people are just going to think, it's Beyoncé poems. It's light and fun." I was kind of super-conscious of that. It's kind of like this weird trick I'm playing, where you're like, "What an interesting, fun cover, and then the name Beyoncé." Then you open it, and it's just about my depression. All of it belongs together.