It's hard to tell people about grief. It's hard to talk to people about poverty... and so I'd got very used to the silence in my own life, and my writing is the only thing that allows me to connect with myself.
When that sentence comes into my life, whether I'm reading it to teach, whether I'm rereading it to write, whether I'm reading it out loud, even just now, tears always spring to my eyes.
I literally loved writing from the very first time I read Nikki Giovanni's poetry. Loved it. And for me, one of the most powerful things about Nikki Giovanni is she made the ordinary so beautiful.
I literally loved writing from the very first time I read Nikki Giovanni's poetry. Loved it... I could smell the lotion between my grandmother's legs when she would braid my hair when I read Nikki Giovanni. Like, I love that. I wanna write like that.
Creativity and talent and drive are not the only things that make authors. Writing is something that requires quite a lot of time and time is very expensive and the piece that you need to have that time is expensive.
I really want to give them the most amount of swoon as I can. I want people to read these quieter moments that are the louder moments in the book, but quieter moments in real life and be able to relate them back and think that was really romantic when my partner did that for me.
