I thought, after the Pulitzer, at least nothing will surprise me quite that much in my life. And another one happened. It was quite amazing.

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.

For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard.

Don't be so fast, you're all you've got.

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.

I loved to read, but I always thought that the dream was too far away. The person who had written the book was a god, it wasn't a person.

I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.