I try to be as honest about what I see and to speak rather than be silent, especially if it means I can save lives, or serve humanity.

Before you speak, get very quiet, do the meditation, say, "Use me as a channel for what needs to get said to this community. This community needs to hear something very important that I'm the only person in the room who can say it. Please help open me so that I'm not frightened and speak through me. Let me be that channel so that I can help heal." You make yourself so humble that you really are like a flute and that music that comes out comes from el corazón. All the people you're connected to from that light that we call love.

I think there's some great stuff coming. I do feel that. I think we have reached our Harlem Renaissance.

I was reading Emily Dickinson and Edwin Arlington Robinson, but these weren't the poets that influenced me. I think Gwendolyn Brooks influenced me because she wrote about Chicago, and she wrote about poor people. And she influenced me in my life by giving me a blurb. I would see her in action, and she listened to every single person. She didn't say, "Oh, I'm tired. I gotta go." She was there, and present, with every single person. She's one of the great teachers.

I have to say that the traditional role is kind of a myth. I think the traditional Mexican woman is a fierce woman.

All of my works are performance pieces, as is true for many writers of color, writers who have indigenous roots - because our basis is spoken word.

I like to mix it up, because the kind of comments you can get from a fiction writer about your poetry are going to be very different than what you'll get from a poet.