Poets From The United States

"You can master the game and still lose the house."

"I hope to add my voice to the African authors before me, beside me, and behind me committed to creating balanced, engaging, informative, and authentic portraits of the continent. I don't want to romanticize Africa, but I do want people to be aware that there is more to the continent than corruption, political unrest, war, disease, poverty, genocide and the rest"

"I wanted to expose the superiority complex people in the West have concerning Africa."

"When citizens allow leaders to get away with providing sub-par infrastructure, or none at all, without demanding more for themselves and their children, nations remain stuck in a cycle of poverty and victimhood"

"I think writers have a responsibility to hold a mirror up to society. The beauty of writing is the reflection can, and should, come in various forms."

"I wanted to make the connection that just because a person is born outside the continent, he/she is not "other""

"Don’t fall into the trap of feeling sorry for yourself because you haven’t yet got to the stage where you can [pursue your dream] full time"

"Look at a day job as a type of fellowship that pays you to research a certain sector or society"

"I wanted to make the point that God works things for good--even when events in life seem random and ridiculous"

"I am motivated to write because it's important to me not to be defined by someone else. If we leave the Storytelling to other people we can't get too mad if they get it wrong. I also love writing--from the inspiration involved in coming up up with a concept to the discipline of the process to stringing the actual words together. I'm so thankful for the gift of words"

"I learned to trust my vision and advocate for it. I had experienced so much rejection that when I heard a “yes” I thought the process of “selling” my idea was over. In fact, that was the moment when I needed to be clearest about my intention"

"Keep going. If you keep writing, you’ll outpace the rejection. Storytelling is as old as humanity—every known civilization has told stories of life as they lived it, passed down legends of how we got here, and created fables or parables to illustrate morals or deliver lessons"

"Stories are inextricable from existence which means your story has incalculable value. It is needed by someone, somewhere, and if you keep at it, at some point you will connect with that someone"

"After “Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes” I was nominated for two collections that I wrote alone and won for both: “Being989336 Full of Light, Insubstantial”, which was 100 poems (Space & Time, 2007) & “How To Recognize A Demon Has Become Your Friend” a collection of short stories and poetry (Necon E-Books, 2011)."

"It was mind-blowing experience (to quote a cliche). I literally was so excited to be on the final ballot with people who were my heroes that it didn’t occur to me that I would actually win. The awards were in New York City so my mother came up from Philly for the awards banquet. It was amazing to receive it and have my mother there (she passed in 2009). She was my biggest supporter and it meant everything to me for her to see this great honoring. I could barely speak. I did get it together enough to make my mother stand up and wave to everyone. It’s one of my happiest memories."

"It’s a poetry collection I put together around the concept of transformation after destruction. There are three sections titled: Things Gone Bad, In Between, Transformation. The poems cover many kinds of loss and transformation, for example: a mother mourning a lost child, a lover loss of self, a revengeful lover, even a human losing their soul to a Voodoo Goddess."

"I didn’t realize then that I was the first Black award winner until someone bought it up and I looked back at the history of HWA Bram Stoker winners. One awesome thing that came out of winning was that my high school, Germantown HS, in Philadelphia asked me to speak at a graduation."

"I received the HWA Bram Stoker award® for “Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes”, a poetry collection published by Space & Time, with an introduction by one of my favorite authors, Charlee Jacob and cover by Colleen Crary, interior illustrations by Marge Simon."

"All of the books I mentioned above are available as print and/or eBooks. The links are on my website"

"Once your work is as good as you can make it Send It Out! Don’t spend time wondering if it will be accepted or not, just get it out the house and start something new. If it comes back and you can make it better, do it. If you can’t make it better, Send It Out anyway. We writers are not the best judge of our work. For sure, your writing will get better the more you write, not necessarily rewriting the same piece."

"Read (all kinds of writing, even the kind you don’t do), listen to music, go to art shows. There is such energy from creating and it’s important to feed all the senses."

"Know that even when you’re not putting words on paper/computer you’re writing. Living is writing. Everything we do feeds creativity, even in the most un-obvious ways."

"Don’t edit while writing first draft, just get it out. This is a rule I often struggle with because I know the quality I want, but I also know it’s important to write it from beginning to end and the editor mind doesn’t help that for me."

"A collaborative collection, “Dark Duet” of music inspired poetry written with Stephen M. Wilson, published by Necon E-Books 2012, was on the final ballot. This was a very special collection for me. Stephen approached me with the project and I was excited to work with him because he did poetry that made shapes on the page and I wanted to try something different. We worked seamlessly together and I’m extremely proud of this book. Unfortunately, Stephen died from cancer in 2013."

"When it came out I had the first book signing set for Sept 11, 2001 in Rockefeller Center in NYC. Yes, that day! I had the book propped up on my desk at my day job as a software developer. When that day came to an end I couldn’t even look at the cover. The first poem is called ‘Fire/Fight’, which I write years before 9/11 but suddenly was too relevant."

"As NYC and I tried to find a new normal after the Towers were destroyed I slowly returned to my book. I was interviewed a couple of times about the book title and opening poem."

"My fourth HWA Bram Stoker award® was received in 2014 for “Four Elements” with Charlee Jacob, Marge Simon & Rain Graves, published by Bad Moon Book. The book has four sections for the four elements, Earth, Fire, Water and Air. Each of us picked an element, mine was Air which I wrote as a person who travels through time and space. I’ve known the other authors for years and it was a great honor working with them to create this collection."

"I would say I’ve spent my whole life making up fairy tales, poetry, etc. I started writing to see myself in print when I was in high school. I had a couple of poems published in my high school magazine. Once I got out of college I started seriously submitting work (and collecting a good number of rejections), eventually the rejections became acceptances around 1994."

"Write, write, write. Write every day, even if only for a few minutes. I believe most writing happens in our subconscious so if we sit down each day the subconscious gets to know, ‘ah so I can show up now’ and it will pour out what it’s been mulling over."

"Everything around me, the news, my past, my hopes for the future, all the positive and negative things that humans do to each other and the planet. I moved from NYC in 2014 to Arizona and went from a city kid to being surrounded by mountains and nature. The mountains and desert have an overall settling effect on me which help me focus."

"A pilgrimage is an admirable remedy for over-fastidiousness and sickly refinement."

"Without the definiteness of sculpture and painting, music is, for that very reason, far more suggestive. Like Milton's Eve, an outline, an impulse, is furnished, and the imagination does the rest."

"It is amusing to detect character in the vocabulary of each person. The adjectives habitually used, like the inscriptions on a thermometer, indicate the temperament."

"Our times might not inaptly be designated as the age of traveling. Its records form no insignificant branch of the literature of the day."

"Travel gives a character of experience to our knowledge, and brings the figures on the tablet of memory into strong relief."

"If conversation be an art, like painting, sculpture, and literature, it owes its most power charm to nature; and the least shade of formality or artifice destroys the effect of the best collection of words."

"Tact is an essential principle of conversation; hence, the eastern metaphor which likens a word spoken in season, to "apples of gold in pictures of silver." The time and the society must regulate the subject."

"There are beauties of character which, like the night-blooming cereus, are closed against the glare and turbulence of every-day life, and bloom only in shade and solitude, and beneath the quiet stars."

"For Truth makes holy Love's illusive dreams, And their best promise constantly redeems."

"Let us recognise the beauty and power of true enthusiasm; and whatever we may do to enlighten ourselves and others, guard against checking or chilling a single earnest sentiment."

"A work of art is said to be perfect in proportion as it does not remind the spectator of the process by which it was created."

"There is a strength of quiet endurance as significant of courage as the most daring feats of prowess."

"To a nice ear, the quality of a voice is singularly affecting. Its depth seems to be allied to feeling; at least, the contralto notes alone give an adequate sense of pathos. They are born near the heart."

"The soul, by an instinct stronger than reason, ever associates beauty with truth."

"I often muse upon the life of the true artist until it redeems to my mind, the more prosaic aspects of human existence."

"This miserable habit of our times is vividly illustrated by the manner in which those next most sacred things to mortals, books, are treated."

"Society is too often at war with love. Thousands of human spirits created to assimilate, to afford mutual comfort and inspiration, to interpret each other, and find in sympathy a balm and motive that will render them superior to vicissitude; thousands of human spirits cross and recross each other's paths, severed by the barriers of vain custom and arbitrary opinion."

"There they breathe a congenial atmosphere. Often subsisting upon the merest pittance, indulging in every vagary of costume, they wander over the land and yield themselves freely to the spirit of adventure and the luxury of art."

"If the perspective of time were not a necessary condition of romance, the present age would be deemed as fertile in the wonderful as any which have preceded it; but this obvious truth, though sometimes acknowledged, is seldom realized."

"When the fluid particles composing the primeval earth settled into consistent masses, an unbroken, uniform plain was not the result; but everywhere, form, color, and density indicated the various species of matter. Verdure crept over the rich loam, long tables of sand marked the limits of the sea, and rocks of every hue stood forth from the hills. Form of aspect and movement became a law of creation. Even the unstable elements obeyed it."