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

Perhaps the greatest challenge has been trying to keep my time to myself and my private life private in order to do my job. Everything that is most mine belongs to everyone now.

There's a lot of people that need these stories, and they can't come to my book, so I'm going to be the bookmobile and I'm going to come to them.

If you're poor, potato chips are the food of life for you. It's the caviar.

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

I remember I was very taken with a book called DreamTigers by [Jorge Luis] Borges. He was at the University of Texas, Austin, and they collected some of his writings and put them in a little collection. It's called DreamTigers in English, but it doesn't exist in Spanish. It's a little sampler. But that collection in English is what struck me, because in there he has his poems, and I was a poet as well as a fiction writer.