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.

Entering into writing a poem is an emotional endeavor for me as well as a spiritual and creative one. Having to write those poems for the inauguration, I started asking deeper questions about my cultural identity, and my connection to America.

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.

As an immigrant, there's a little part of you that always says, "Well, I'm not a hundred percent American." America is some other little boy or some other place I haven't been to yet.

Artists are the emotional historians of the world.

Your life is a work of art that you will work on the rest of your life.

Good art and a good life answers questions. Great art and a great life asks questions.