It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.

I think children have talent and insight, but it gets beaten out of them.

I prefer to explore the most intimate moments, the smaller, crystallized details we all hinge our lives on.

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

I believe people may have a predisposition for artistic creativity. It doesn't mean they're going to make it.

What's a word, a talisman, to hold against the world?

As an African-American, as a woman I think that I've been sensitized to the way in which history privileges the white male and the way in which certain aspects of history, the things that we are taught in school, the things that are handed down never, never entered the picture though they might have been very important.