Maybe all pain in the world requires poetry.

I had to learn quick, because I was performing in Cinco de Mayo festivals with babies crying and people lifting their beers, and you know the feather dancers would come, and they'd say, "What are you, a poet? You're next".

Writing poetry helps me to write my fiction; each thing helps the other.

I've put up with too much, too long, and now I'm just too intelligent, too powerful, too beautiful, too sure of who I am finally to deserve anything less.

By community I mean that community you have a special vision for, that only you see, that no one else in a room sees. That special community in pain, that through a pain you've suffered, you're able to have that vision, that super-ray vision.

One of the things we learned from that panel is the way poor communities use a library is very different from wealthy communities. But the way the library books are measured are by how many books are taken out. And people in poor communities sometimes won't take the book out because they're afraid to. They're afraid of losing it and not being able to replace it.

When I was writing Caramelo the last couple of years, a sixty-hour work week was normal. And now I'm lucky if I have eight hours.