“It wasn’t until I was named Youth Poet Laureate of L.A. in high school though that I officially began calling myself a poet. I just always loved writing, period.”

I am my own best mirror.

I try to approach reading in front of millions of people as I would reading in somebody’s living room.

Your daily challenge to not be like a boss, but the boss, in all things you.

Let each dawn find us courageous, brought closer, heeding the lights before the fight is over.

Give us the ballot, and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights.

I think we run into issues when our online brands are not rooted in who we are, and I think we need to have explicit discussions with ourselves about who we want to be, what we want to represent, and how we want to express that.

I close my eyes and I am with this army of young women standing in a line and I imagine us walking forward together.

To hone my voice, I read everything, from books to cereal boxes, three times: once for fun, the second time to learn something new about the writing craft, and the third time was to improve that piece.

The fight isn’t over – it’s just begun. It’s time to suit up for a battle that might determine the war.

I am the daughter of Black writers who are descended from Freedom Fighters who broke their chains and changed the world. They call me.

See the line where the sky meets the sea.

Poetry and language are often at the heartbeat of movements for change.

As a young black woman, I notice at times in the mainstream media framing of the ‘me too’ movement you see a white female face or a white male face, and that type of questioning and interrogation needs to happen.

Poetry is interesting because not everyone is going to become a great poet, but anyone can be, and anyone can enjoy poetry, and it’s this openness, this accessibility of poetry that makes it the language of people.

That’s kind of the challenging thing about writing an inaugural poem. You’re speaking to everyone, but you don’t also want to speak for everyone.

When you are learning through poetry how to speak English, it lends to a great understanding of sound, of pitch, of pronunciation, so I think of my speech impediment not as a weakness or a disability, but as one of my greatest strengths.

I loved you in pain and when I began to bleed I called it magic.

When we began, we approached it the way we did because we were not prepared to be out-of-work musicians, ever. We said either take it on as a serious commodity or don’t do it at all.

Ran out of time, before we even began. How long will the road not taken be starved of footprints?

A First Sign of the Beginning of Understanding is the Wish to Die.

It’s time that we began to laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.

Woe to the statesman whose arguments for entering a war are not as convincing at its end as they were at the beginning, Bismarck had cautioned.

This is the end. For me the beginning of life.

The cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise godfearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ.