“I realized I had to go back to where I came from in order to find my voice. When I did, it was this mother tongue. It was my grandmother. It was my mama. It was then that the accent that I had to lose, I had to return to in order to speak my own poems.”

“Tenderness sometimes isn’t always about the way that truth is told but maybe it’s in the images or its in the sound, trying to offer some kind of play or delight.”

"So I am writing into that darkness, into that violent wind, and looking for the peace and looking for the light."

“Writers of color run into that wall over and over and over again where people say, ‘that’s not the story I expect from you,’ and therefore it’s not worthy. And I don’t care about that. Right? It’s my story, and my story is a story of people who are connected to the land and in a usually pretty joyful way.”

“The idea of haunting and of family are different and wider and stranger than we might think.”