I don’t remember learning to read, only that one moment I couldn’t and the next moment I could and my world changed forever. A shy only child, I was suddenly surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses.
What Narcissism Meant to Me: My Entry into the Poetry World
I didn’t really want to write anything very long, and I didn’t feel I was cut out for a novel. Instead, I started going to poetry slams, reading poems that I wrote out of humor and for fun.
To Read, To Love
I write a lot about women, about race and color. Now removed from the place of my birth, these are themes that gnaw at me, that nag, that haunt.
Good Girls Write Bad
. When I was thirteen, I read "The Great Gatsby" for the first time. Even then, I had no interest in Nick or Daisy or Gatsby himself. I was so interested in the character of George Wilson who was “so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive” that I named my cat after him.
Books as a Way of Becoming
If there is one theme I can’t escape writing about in everything I create it is how someone becomes themselves. What choices, circumstances, system, sorrow shaped them into who they are? And will they stay stuck or keep growing into themselves?
Living My Dream
...but one poet that had a big influence on me was Tony Hoagland. I had the pleasure of being his student in a three-day workshop he taught in Houston back in 2014 entitled “Five Powers of Poetry.” He introduced me to the existence of a muscle I was not aware of having before: “the muscle of specificity,” which I have been exercising and using in my poetry since then.