“It was in the air somehow. That ownership of bigotry. I hadn’t seen it since I was a kid.”

I learned a new language for it all in the 90s. Which in some ways isn’t bad.

The 1990s were also when a bunch of the soft-shoe language for race, gender, and class became paramount.

One of the hardest things for me to do is be fully open in a poem.

But fortunately there are also really excellent human beings all over the place, too. So it’s about perception and balance sometimes I think.

The contrasts between the haves and have-nots is so complicated.

I was fortunate enough to get a job at my alma mater, which brought me back to Indiana after being gone for twenty years.

One of the things I took from the show was emotional possibility.

I was a poor, geeky black kid in Indianapolis. There is nothing mythological about that.

You should check out William Shatner’s album The Transformed Man.

Because before that I wasn’t thinking about systems or food insecurity or whatever.

It’s financial of course, but it’s also the lifestyle choices. The more money people have the further away from each other they often want to be.

It made me want to change the kinds of poems I was writing, but I’m terrible at writing overtly political poems.

I wanted to be like Spock because he was unflappable.

I never thought I would type that I learned how to emote in poems from watching Star Trek but there it is.

Bones was a grouch but he was sympathetic. The show worked like a boy band in that way… it had characters who embodied different psychic or emotional positions and that allowed me to see a great range of things

That was one of things that surprised me so much when I was writing the poems.

When I read Dickens for the first time, I thought he was Jewish, because he wrote about oppression and bigotry, all the things that my father talked about.

Bigotry doesn’t care about state or regional lines. It’s all over the place.

Whites and Blacks––to recognize that racial disparities fueled by unwarranted bigotry were crippling America’s ability to shine as a true beacon of democracy in a world filled with people

Bigotry has always been the poison of America, and we oughta do everything to eradicate it with no excuses or explanations.