I had been thinking about the question, "What do I love about America?" I kept coming back to this idea of community and home, which already obsessed me in my work. But I couldn't quite figure out how to lead beyond my immediate experience. Then I was just standing at the kitchen sink, and I watched the sun rise, and I thought, "How many hundreds of thousands of people are watching the same sun rise right now?" I just knew the poem would go from that line.

Artists are the emotional historians of the world.

Everything is symbolic. If they'd picked some middle-aged white guy, well, that would have been a symbol, but it wouldn't have been shocking because that's the expected norm, right? I felt I was a good match: here's an accomplished poet, and he's also gay and Latino.

What was transformative was being at the inauguration, reading my poem, and realizing that the quest for home and identity had always been part of my work, but that I'd been home all along.

I like the labels because I think they tell my story in a very concise way: gay, Latino. I think the responsibility that comes with accepting labels is that now I get a chance to break stereotypes. It gives me the opportunity to tell the unique stories of what those labels mean.

We have always been searching for home. It's in our art... our religion... everything.

I was at a stage in my life where I felt sort of comfortable being a dislocated person emotionally, feeling in some ways like a man without any particular country. I had come to a nice space with the imaginary Cuba or the imaginary America that I thought existed.