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.

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.

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

I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.

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

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.

I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.