"When I started writing, there were only two women writers that I knew: Lorraine Sutton and Margie Simmons. There were very few Latinas writing in English... So when I started, I was mainly surrounded by men-Pedro Pietri, Jesus Papoleto Melendez, Lucky Cienfuegos, Miguel Algarín, Miguel Piñero, Tato Laviera. Many of them had books already published. I was like a sponge, absorbing different things from these male contemporaries."

"When I was young, I was placed in a boarding school where I was not allowed to speak my natural Spanish, which was all I spoke until I was five. Not being allowed to speak Spanish in school traumatized me with inhibitions about speaking."

"In boarding school, in the second grade I made the decision that I was going to be an artist because I wouldn't have to talk. I could express myself with colors, and it was safe...So I basically became a listener, an observer. My mother thought that something was wrong with me. I became an extreme introvert who wouldn't talk. You wouldn't believe that about me today because I'm very different, but back then I had a lot of fears about language. It wasn't until that art class that I opened up to words. I started experimenting and incorporating words into some of my drawings."

"I feel live I'm constantly evolving into my own voice."

"The poet is a truth bearer of reality and image. We live in a society of denial that doesn't want to see or hear these truth tales, so consequently poets are shunned to a great degree because people don't always want to hear the truth."

"Bureaucrats shifting responsibility,/shuffling lives into despair"

"My father's family is Puerto Rican, my mother's family is Dominican. I start with Puerto Rican-Dominican, then I go to Borinqueña-Quisqueyana, because Borinqueña means I am a native of Borinquen, the Taino name for Puerto Rico, and Quisqueyana means I am a native of Quisqueya, the Taino name for the Dominican Republic. The Tainos were the indigenous people who inhabited the islands of the Caribbean before Columbus arrived and renamed their land. So if someone calls you Borinqueño, Boricua, or Quisqueyana, they're saying that you're someone who identifies with your past and your culture. It's also a reference to nationhood. I'm making connections to my history by tagging that on. The Africana identifies another part of my roots. I'm saying that I'm American, born in the Bronx, but I'm also Taino and African."

"born/from the holy tree where one is brother/to all brothers, sister/to all sisters."

"I disagree with the statements that all Tainos were wiped out because many fled and hid in the mountains; they mixed and married, so the Taino is still very present in our society. Recent DNA testing has proved this to be true in spite of what the history books tell us. You know, you can't always believe those accounts written in books. It depends on who is writing it and why, what is the point they are getting at to try and convince whoever may be the reader."

"I'm still a painter. I consider myself a painter who uses poetry as a different way of painting. It wasn't until I was in college that I started experimenting with words and language."

"We know the projections about Latinos becoming the largest minority within the next few years, but you can go to Barnes and Noble across the street, where they have a department store of books, or any other franchise bookstore anywhere in the States, and you won't even find one aisle devoted to Latino literature. So what are they trying to tell us-that we don't have a literature? Or that we don't read or write or buy books? None of this is true. We are a community with a vibrant and extensive literature, but we are still a marginalized culture, even now in this new millennium."

"In the old days poets used to go into the factories and the sugar and tobacco plantations and recite to the workers while they were doing their thing. No more. Perhaps it's a fear of intelligence, of language. A fear of self-realization."

"suspended from the high branches of an old wisdom tree"

"forming bridges of correspondence from old to new worlds."

"There is the argument that anyone's writing is meant to be shared with the universe. I want to die knowing that my children are going to have some kind of legacy because this is all I have to give-my work."

"I was raised by my mother, but around my father's family. She was alone. My father's family rejected my mother because she was too dark, and they were only a slight shade lighter. Their attitude was based on racist criteria of appearances that people had back then, when the hue of your skin defined who you were, where you were able to go, what you I could learn, do, and achieve in life."

"I seek poems that rise from the ashes"

"Music has been a very important part of my life."

"We have only to look at the devastation reaped upon Vieques to understand why we have to demand our autonomy."

"I'm still angry, but I'm angry in a different way. I've released a lot of it. I'm still frustrated about a lot of things about the marginalization that happens to us. It keeps showing its face."

"within these verses is history"

"Poems are for the livin', that's what I know."

"I want to know/who will decide our fate?/You, or I, or WE together?/Will I be free to discover my own path?"

"I think there are many people out there who are ready and want to embrace a multicultural ideology."

"how we are marginalized, how whole communities are sedated with the new slavery of drugs, how we are easily offered various forms of addiction to cope with our situations, anything from drugs, alcohol, religion, sex, television, food, money-take your pick. A poet named Safiya said, "We all are addicted to something." But we still manage to dream in spite of it."

"Discovering new meanings for old words/listed in the encyclopedia of colonialism."

"My position is that people should be able to determine for themselves. I believe in the right of choice and self-determination. I also believe that people should not be exploited unless they agree to it. And who does?"

"When I was in Cuba, I saw some things that really impressed me. When we arrived, on the way to the hotel we were driving through the streets late at night. I expressed concern when I saw a woman walking alone. Our chaperone told us that they don't have the same issues of sexual exploitation and rape like in the United States. And then I also saw that they had twenty-four-hour day care. That made sense. I saw free hospitalization and free education"

"I'm definitely English dominant. I've learned to think and feel in English, although on occasions Spanish comes back."

"I want to learn about my past, my culture. She (her mother) talks to me in broken English, reminding me how wonderful it is to be an American; I talk to her in broken Spanish, attempting to explain why I want to know more about our history and culture."

"I didn't know anything about my Puerto Rican or Dominican culture until I was in my late twenties. This information was not taught or available in the schools. And it's still pretty much the case. I go into the schools today, and one of the first lessons I do with the children is to talk about the Taino Indians. You would think with all the information available today, that students would know something. But the kids are amazed when they hear me talk about this. I ask them if they know the meaning of Borinqueña or Quisqueyana. Even in Washington Heights, in a school that is predominantly Dominican, they don't know where Quisqueya comes from, even though they've heard it a thousand times. They don't know that it's a Taino word. They don't know that it was the Indian name of their island. So this information is still missing, yet still terribly important."

"Sometimes, within the African American community, being Latina can be a liability rather than an asset. But then, that's why it's important to know our history, to know how we are connected, how we are victims of the diaspora that divided our families and plunged us into ideas of segregation and disunity. It's so important to know our history to overcome the misconceptions about race and culture."

"Now you have Latino studies departments in some of the universities. And even though some of these are still highly marginalized and no more than token gestures of integration, inclusion, and diversification, where you get only one or two classes, there's still a demand for it. People want this information. This is a multicultural society. People are tired and bored with exclusivity."

"Climb the stairway of your imagination"

"We are infants compared to the universe"

"Intelligence and feelings forming alliances for seeing."

"The inner life has no boundaries"

"How I love to listen./Remind myself there is more to the world./How I have learned to grow from it."

"Take off the mask. Discard it."

"See for yourself/the you inside no one else can see."

"These words are the weight cupped in our palms: the small broken note of freedom."

"Part of it hides behind the headlines where this shard of the story will never be told."

"Lisa Suhair Majaj has one of the most necessary voices writing in the world today. Her exquisite poems sustain and hearten us, lift us out of the morass of deception and delusion. Her images and scenes offer up clean, brave truth. Here is the saving grace of honesty, dignity, and deep compassion. Here is a keen, elegant eye and a care wider than any single horizon."

"how a word transforms us seedling taking delicate hold or a weed choking the tender plants news enters us and puts down roots"

"The distance between one breath and another is like the miles starlight travels to reach my dreams."

"so I hoard memories sort them for seeds to plant pray they root"

"consider a delicate porcelain bowl how it crushes under a single blow- in one moment whole years disappear"

"Once she could have held anything steady and safe: a glass of tea, her brother's baby. Now her hands shake at the weight of a fork."

"Did my parents know that what they planted, roots against the drought, would survive?"

"hopes for peace: hand clasped in hand firmer than fist on a gun or club, hand raised in greeting stronger than hand raised for violence"