“When you have to teach yourself how to say sounds, when you have to be highly concerned about pronunciation, it gives you a certain awareness of sonics, of the auditory experience.”

I don’t want it to be something that becomes a cage, where to be a successful Black girl, you have to be Amanda Gorman and go to Harvard. I want someone to eventually disrupt the model I have established.

You don’t have to be a poet, you don’t have to be a politician or be in the White House to make an impact with your words. We all have this capacity to find solutions for the future.

Poetry is the lens we use to interrogate the history we stand on and the future we stand for.

If a woman doesn’t give herself permission, who will?

No matter how you say it, the hill we climb is a hill we climb together.

I think it made me all that much stronger of a writer when you have to teach yourself how to say words from scratch.

When you’re someone who’s lived a life where certain resources were scarce, you always feel like abundance is forbidden fruit.

What a day. What a life. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you

It was so incredible meeting Lady Gaga. I mean I’m gaga for Gaga, literally. We kind of just each flew to each other like magnets after the ceremony ended and we were both just crying and hugging.

Poetry is – it’s an art form, but, to me, it’s also a weapon, it’s also an instrument. It’s the ability to make ideas that have been known, felt and said. And that’s a real, I think, type of duty for the poet.

We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace and the norms and notions of what just is, isn’t always justice.

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.

We know. We believe. And we act, because it is our civic duty.

When they tell you to go back to where you come from, tell them proudly that this is where you come from.

I was writing since I can remember – I just didn’t know it was poetry yet, or that writing could be a career.

I was born early, along with my twin, and a lot of times, for infants, that can lead to learning delays.

I’m a big believer in winging it. I’m a big believer that you’re never going to find the perfect city travel experience or the perfect meal without a constant willingness to experience a bad one.

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.

The journey is part of the experience – an expression of the seriousness of one’s intent. One doesn’t take the A train to Mecca.

You are living a fleeting experience that you call life, you settle for short-term happiness moving away from light.

I am on another planet experiencing myself the colors run but I’m not caught up on perfections here I just want to be my own friend again I just want to love my bones without restraint.

Hurricanes and airplanes, we fly higher than the end of time.

I do not hate the scars they hold me together binding flesh and experience gnarled lines.

Life of wholeness does not depend on what we experience. Wholeness depends on how we experience our lives