I don't like a kind of workshop that is about editing--I don't want to sit there and be an editor. I don't want to tell someone how to "fix" a poem.

A man's pursuit of knowledge is greater than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision.

Jesmyn Ward left her Gulf Coast home for education and experience, but it called her back. It called on her in most painful ways, to mourn. In Men We Reaped, Jesmyn unburies her dead, that they may live again. And through this emotional excavation, she forces us to see the problems of place and race that led these men to their early graves. Full of beauty, love, and dignity, Men We Reaped is a haunting and essential read.

I don't like a kind of workshop that is about editing--I don't want to sit there and be an editor. I don't want to tell someone how to "fix" a poem.

There are indeed all sorts of men/ who visit here: those who want/ nothing but to talk or hear the soft tones/ of a woman's voice; others prefer/ simply to gaze upon me, my face/ turned from them as they touch/ only themselves. And then there are those,/ of course, whose desires I cannot commit/ to paper.

When I was born here in Gulfport in 1966, my parents' interracial marriage was still illegal. And it was very hard to drive around town with my parents, to be out in public with my parents.

The act of making poetry is an act of hope.