My best times are midnight to six actually. I'll leaf through my notebooks and if something catches my eye and I feel like I want to transfer it from the notebook to the page, I do, and then comes this very strange process which is difficult to describe in that I'll write until I get stuck or I can't go any further or I'm boring myself or whatever and then I might go to another poem.

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.

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

Rap is only one end of a whole spectrum of verbal play and virtuosity. Rap is geared for aural pleasure.

You have to imagine it possible before you can see something. You can have the evidence right in front of you, but if you can't imagine something that has never existed before, it's impossible.

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 First Book: Go ahead, it won't bite. Well... maybe a little. More a nip, like. A tingle. It's pleasurable, really. You see, it keeps on opening. You may fall in. Sure, it's hard to get started; remember learning to use knife and fork? Dig in: you'll never reach bottom. It's not like it's the end of the world -- just the world as you think you know it.