I think I felt at some point that I couldn't understand poetry or that it was beyond me or it didn't speak to my experience. I think that was because I hadn't yet found the right poems to invite me in.

I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it.

From the catbird seat, I've found poetry to be the necessary utterance it has always been in America.

The experience of poetry could bring my mother back to me. Poetry offers a different kind of solace - here on earth.

Even as I think of myself as a 'rememberer,' I also know my memory is probably doing all this work to reconstruct a narrative where I come off better.

I think that it's hard enough being an adolescent and wanting so much to fit in with your peers, your schoolmates, and to erase any sign of difference, to be part of the group. And being biracial but also being black in a predominately white school marked me as different.