Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to poetry. It's about using words in very precise ways and using gesture.

If we’re going to solve the problems of the world, we have to learn how to talk to one another. Poetry is the language at its essence. It’s the bones and the skeleton of the language. It teaches you, if nothing else, how to choose your words.

Creative writing and literacy go hand and hand.

Anyone can tell you that how you're raised as a child has a great deal to do with how you behave as an adult and whether you have complexes or whether you need to prove yourself or all that kind of stuff and yet the mother in a traditional family who has raised a child never makes it in the history books.

I think that when a poem can move readers across generations and across its specific class or race then it becomes truly classic.

I carry a notebook with me everywhere. But that's only the first step.

The library is an arena of possibility, opening both a window into the soul and a door onto the world.