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.
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.
What contributed to my writing early on is how my mom encouraged it. She kept the TV off because she wanted my siblings and I to be engaged and active. So we made forts, put on plays, musicals, and I wrote like crazy.
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.
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 have to interweave my poetry with purpose. For me, that purpose is to help people, and to shed a light on issues that have far too long been in the darkness.
I did a lot of sitting back and thinking about what I wanted for myself and what I wanted for my country: more unity, more support for the arts and more opportunities for young writers from marginalized groups.
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 grew up at this incredibly odd intersection in Los Angeles, where it felt like the black ‘hood met black elegance met white gentrification met Latin culture met wetlands.
