Great Throughts Treasury

"[I've] learned how to pull the mic away and attack the poetry with my body."

"[My] hunger and thirst was, and still remains: How do I get people who hate poetry to love me?"

"Music is a big influence in my work and sometimes drives the energy of where I want to go."

"When you went to a privileged school to learn a Shakespearean sonnet, I was getting those beats kicked and shoved into me."

"I don't know, I think that if I had any regrets, that would cancel out the great people that I have in my life. All the tough stuff that I've gone through that I don't wish on no one else has brought a beautiful community to me."

"I talk to my kids about my mother's energy and how she would have loved them. I talk about how kind and polite my father was. So that they have some kind of remembrance that even though my parents died from their addictions and so that they know they were genuine in how they were."

"Work controls my life, writing controls my life, performing controls my life."

"You think black entertainers have it hard finding work in this business? I'm a suspicious mulatto, which means I'm too black to be white and too white to be doing it right."