I grew up in Ohio, where civil-rights accomplishments had already begun to accelerate before Martin Luther King appeared. In hindsight, we know that many people, black and white, were instrumental in changing the Jim Crow status quo on all levels.

Poetry of all the forms of literature I think is the most suited for the digital age and for the shorter attention spans and all of that. It Twitters very easily, some lyric poems and it's very easy to zip a poem to someone, so that's one of the things I think is wonderful about poetry in the digital age.

In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things

Listen how they say your name. If they can't say that right, there's no way they're going to know how to treat you proper, neither.

Going to the library was the one place we got to go without asking for permission. And they let us choose what we wanted to read. It was a feeling of having a book be mine entirely.

Poetry connects you to yourself, to the self that doesn't know how to talk or negotiate.

All of us have moments in our childhood where we come alive for the first time. And we go back to those moments and think, This is when I became myself.