That's what you need for your writing - to learn how to be present, learn how to be calm. So take that nap, do that meditation.

Perhaps the community you mentioned might not come to the story. Sometimes you have to take the story to them, and perform it, and that's another way that I get an alternate point of view that isn't the official version of history out to a community. I feel that's what I've been doing since Caramelo.

I'm from Chicago, so the Chicago working-class poets still mean a great deal to me.

When I was very young I was reading a lot of Latin American fiction, which later would be called "boom fiction."

I wish somebody had told me love does not die, that we can continue to receive and give love after death.

You have to remember that writing itself is so solitary. You start writing because you're lonely.

I realize that when I moved out of my father’s house I shocked and frightened him because I needed a room of my own, a space of my own to reinvent myself.