Authors From The United States

"Paint me Hopeful Paint Me Futuristic Paint Me Nikki I'm a Poet"

"Poets shouldn't commit suicide. That would leave the world to those without imaginations or hearts. That would bequeath to the world a mangled syntax and no love of champagne. Poets must live in misery and ecstasy, to sing a song with the katydids. Poets should be ashamed to die before they kiss the sun."

"Poetry is the culture of a people. We are poets even when we don’t write poems; just look at our life, our rhythms, our tenderness, our signifying, our sermons and our songs."

"You have to read the poem and say, “My god, that’s a good poem,” and kind of smile at yourself. If you’re not willing to do that, then you’re wasting your time, and you’re hurting yourself in another way because you’re trying to please somebody who doesn’t like you. You don’t want to get in that position."

"it is not unusual that the old bury the young though it is an abomination ...those who make war call themselves diplomats ...the unfaithful pray loudest ...we judge a man by his dreams not alone his deeds ...by his intent not alone his shortcomings ...it is not unusual to know him through those who love him"

"The boys of my gang – there were six or seven of us – none of them lived to be men, to be 21 years old, except one. All of them are dead from some violence or other, shot or cut to death before they were men, by white society…"

"...i sit waiting for a fresh thought to stir the atmosphere"

"i hope my shoulder finds a head that needs nestling ...i hope i die warmed by the life that i tried to live"

"That disadvantage sometimes pushes you, you know, if you use it right, because you want to rid yourself of those things that hurt you emotionally when you're coming up."

"they say you should fight the cold with the cold but since i never do anything right i called you"

"how do you write a poem about someone so close ...don't you already know what i feel and if you don't maybe i should check my feelings"

"may i spin a poem around you come let's step into my web and dream of freedom together"

"...do you ever stop to think what it looked like before it was an avenue ...ever look south ...and see gazelles running playfully after the lions ...did you ever, sit down and wonder about what freedom's freedom would bring ...the , Alonquin and ... could caress the earthever think what Harlem would be like if our herbs and roots and elephant ears grew... the parrot parroting ...ever think it's possible for us to be happy"

"if trees could talk wonder what they'd say met an old man ...told me "girl! my hands seen more than all them books... at tuskeegee" ...met an old woman ..."sista" she called to me "...my feet seen more than yo eyes ever gonna read" ...if trees would talk wonder what they'd tell me"

"At the library I would go the shelves alphabetically. I was drawn to anyone with a female name, with a Latino or Spanish name. There were very, very few. But as a teenager I discovered African American poetry. Gwendolyn Brooks was the first. Then Phillis Wheatley. I really identified with this slave woman writing poetry to assert and affirm her humanity. Suddenly my eyes were open to history. There was a whole explosion of African-American women poets-Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, June Jordan. I have a poem in my head that's going to take me years to write down. Its working title is "On Thanking Black Muses." I owe them, because poetry really changed my life, saved it."

"...as i grew and matured i became more sensible and decided i would settle down and just become a sweet inspiration"

"Politics is personal. That, however, doesn’t mean it’s ideological. It means that one cares about what she or he is doing, what he or she is writing…"

"As a writer, one has to be willing to be wrong, willing to make mistakes. I’ve put everything on the table and accepted the fact that I may come up short. And, if (or when) I do, that’s okay."

"let's build what we become when we dream"

"I came into it equipped with these principles because of my Asian-American-studies background, but there was certainly a negotiation that had to take place just for me to get a foot in the door."

"What happens when you populate a movie with a lot of Asian-American people is that they get to be people."

"I was super-excited to do it, but I still felt a little nervous about it and I felt like my parents would be a good way for me to test if this was OK…They’re immigrants, and they understand what’s going on over there a little better than me…As soon as I brought it up to them, they thought it was hilarious."

"To us, it was important throughout the writing process that we put things in that were funny, number one, but also that felt like they came from a real place. And the conversations these characters have, reflect on the conversations we have. For us, it didn’t really feel like we were making any commentary or making any stereotypes, it was really us trying."

"Many writers believe that voice, which is character-based, is the same as style, which I believe is more author-based. The writer almost always has her own style, but I believe that in addition to being drawn to a particular author’s style, readers are also drawn to the singularity of the fictive voice, which is somewhat variant from work to work…"

"James Baldwin once said that he wasn't able to really write about America until he left America. And I have this feeling that if you’re in a place, sometimes it’s very difficult to write about it honestly because you’re still dealing with your living in that place, and you don’t have as much perspective. Whereas, if you leave a place, then everything that that place means to you comes into sharper relief, compared to where you’re now living…"

"…I’ve lived in so many places, so I almost feel as though I’m not a native of any one place—though, I definitely consider myself a Southerner. I was raised in Louisville, Kentucky and Atlanta, Georgia. But other places in terms of writing: I’ve written about Baltimore quite a bit, even though in terms of the percentage of my life lived in certain places, Baltimore probably occupies a very small percentage. It’s just been a large part of my imagination in terms of where stories are set…"

"I think many [newer] writers are told to “write what you know” because doing so inherently puts them in touch with the sort of deep struggles they’ve wrestled with—even though the fledging writer might immediately downgrade the importance of those struggles simply because they went through them, and feel such struggles aren’t “poetic” enough to justify being written about. But much good writing is about self-evaluation, self-observation. We simultaneously see ourselves in the world and see ourselves through the world. One must care deeply about what we write or else we won’t see deeply enough to make others care and see…"

"…A lot of women write about messy, complex and complicated things. Our lives and experiences as women are complicated, and very dense, and on some levels, I think more multidimensional, because we have a whole lot more to deal with. Men don’t have periods. They don’t have babies, and nowadays they don’t have to worry about just taking care of a family. We women do all of that. And so, I find on some levels, our lives are a little bit more interesting…"

"Life is a lot of stops and starts, but when you get in your 50s, you see there is a finish line, and I want to go out sliding into home."

"I feel like, as a person of color, I’ve always been kind of doing the work against the tide…I feel like change is coming, and change sometimes comes too slow for a lot of us. But it comes."

"I think what happened was the language settled in me much deeper than it settled into people who just can read something once and absorb what they absorb of it. I feel like what I was absorbing was not by any means superficial. And I think I was - from a really young age, I was reading like a writer. I was reading for this deep understanding of the literature not simply to hear the story but to understand how the author got the story on the page…"

"I want it to be there for the people who need it. I don’t want anyone to walk through the world feeling invisible ever again."

"I realized the more specific the story, the more universal it becomes."

"The South was very segregated. I mean, all through my childhood, long after Jim Crow was supposed to not be in existence, it was still a very segregated South. And the town we lived in - Nicholtown, which was a small community within Greenville, S.C. - was an all-black community. And people still lived very segregated lives, I think, because that was all they had always known. And there was still this kind of danger to integrating. So people kind of stayed in the places - the safe places that they had always known."

"I'm not trying to be Toni Morrison or Katherine Anne Porter or Virginia Woolf. I'm not trying to do anything except tell stories."

"I would say that I write out of frustration. If I were a witch, I would twitch my nose and fix it all and make things easier for all of us. That's what's underneath it."

"With Footnotes, I want people to appreciate the lost molecules of conflict: the details and sideshows that only exist until the people who remember them die. But I also want them to remember, when they're watchi the news, that it comes to them out of context and that history always comes back to haunt you. An incident can resonate for a whole century or even longer."

"What I try to do with my images is just give the reader a real feel for a place…It's very visceral. You open the page, and you are right there in the moment."

"History is a combination of a lot of things. You can’t isolate events today and say, “Oh, well, this happened—those awful people.” The acts might be brutal, but there must be a context to it. I certainly didn’t want to drop the reader into those incidents without telling the story of, well: Why are there refugees? Why were the Israelis and the Palestinians battling along the border? Who were the fedayeen? What was the Israeli response to that? But more than that, I think, for me, the book ends up being—this is going to sound strange—a dead end. Because I don’t know where to go from here, except to delve into human psychology. I think I understand how history works. I understand why one people are battling another people. I understand that they both want land. But ultimately there’s a level that I haven’t really got to yet…"

"Some people have told me that hiding my eyes makes it easier for them to put themselves in my shoes, so I've kind of stuck with it. I'm a nondescript figure; on some level, I'm a cipher. The thing is: I don't want to emote too much when I draw myself. The stories are about other people, not me. I'd rather emphasise[sic] their feelings…"

"When I started to make translations I was just doing it intuitively, and my tendency was to stick to the original as much as possible. Then I gained more confidence in my own poetry and my own writing and I began to become less concerned about being strictly faithful to the original and more concerned with producing a good poem in English. What I have often found—especially in the translations that are done by scholars—is that they’re very faithful to the content of the original language, but in English they don’t really sound that good as poems."

"When you’re confronted with your community being rendered invisible to the culture-at-large, a mission as straightforward as nurturing and promoting your community’s storytellers can, in my view, be viewed as a form of activism. Another, if one works in a context like mine, is exposing one’s students to the work of your community’s poets and writers…"

"The advice to any young poet is to embrace your freedom and not feel constrained to write in one particular way or only about one particular topic. If they’re Latino poets, I would encourage them not only to read widely, but also to read Latino poetry, to familiarize themselves with their particular tradition within American literature…"

"At the risk of over-generalizing, my sense is that American poetry, where popular culture is concerned, is a poetry of freedom and permission—that there are certainly poets who embrace it and have enjoyed success, from a publishing perspective, in embracing it…"

"It is a very physically and mentally torturous process. It goes 18-20 hours a day, and if you’re stoned during that whole period, you’re not going to make a good movie, because you just won’t have the stamina to physically and mentally do that. And it’s every day. So we didn’t get stoned making the record, never stoned on stage. But we were very disciplined artists about what we were doing. It didn’t magically happen. Well, it did magically happen, but not without effort."

"America, which idealizes the rights of the individual above everything else, is in reality, a nation dominated by the social power of groups, classes, in-groups and cliques—both ethnic and religious. The individual in America has few rights that are not backed up by the political, economic and social power of one group or another. Hence, the individual Negro has, proportionately, very few rights indeed because his ethnic group (whether or not he actually identifies with it) has very little political, economic or social power (beyond moral grounds) to wield. Thus it can be seen that those Negroes, and there are very many of them, who have accepted the full essence of the Great American Ideal of individualism are in serious trouble trying to function in America."

"Right when I was born. I was born and my uncle looked in the crib and I was this curled-up little baby and he says, "Oh, he looks like a little chicharron." The chicharron is a deep-fried pig skin, you know? And I looked like this little curlycue, like a curly fry. And he said, "Oh, he looks like a little chicharron." So that became my family name, Chicharron. And that got shortened to Cheech…"

"It is very much like Chicano art..It is sophisticated and primitive simultaneously. The scenes would play out and ... the comedy would be absorbed rather than having it jammed down [your throat]."

"Yes, I am an Evangelical Christian. I believe the Bible. And I also believe that our earth was created through a process called Evolution. None of these notions contradict. In fact, these all together actually enrich my faith. Evolution causes me to stand in awe before the amazing Creator of the Universe and worship him for his majesty and creativity. And on this, I differ greatly from Ken Ham. Ham does not speak for me nor does he speak for the faith of the vast majority of Christians worldwide. To my non-Christian friends, please understand this. Please know that Christian faith does not automatically equal and anti-knowledge. In fact, for many of us, I think that kind of faith is one that is inherently contradictory to our understanding of who our God is."

"For me, tonight’s debate was incredibly troubling. As I sat and heard Ken Ham argue that belief in evolution can lead to abortion, euthanasia, and killing our grandparents, I felt like beating our heads against the wall."