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" I feel like it's a gift for any writer to be recognized like this. "

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" I think humans have always felt watched back by whatever is out there flickering in the distance. What excites me is what the imagination creates, not simply in explanation of what is there but also to explain or justify the feeling of awe and attachment that the heavens inspire. "

" Prose is something that is persistent in staying in one place long enough to not only zero in on the dramatic effect of something that might have happened, or something that might have been seen, but also in watching how it played out and thinking about the cause and the effect. "

" I go to a lot of writers conferences and literary festivals that tend to be in college towns or cities, and I'm eager to see what happens if those same texts and those same questions move outside of those areas to smaller rural communities where there are surely people who read and love poetry. "

" I have kept journals at different times in my life. And a lot of my early notebooks became places where I would just think on the page, trying to parse what I was feeling, to find out what I was thinking. "

" For me, a poem is an opportunity to kind of interrogate myself a little bit. "

" I have this belief that we are so vulnerable when we open ourselves up to literature. We're reminded of these real parts of ourselves. "

" I want to just go to places where writers don't usually go, where people like me don't usually show up, and say, 'Here are some poems. Do they speak to you? What do you hear in them?' "

" The glib, facile, simplistic, and prefabricated language by which we as consumers are constantly surrounded is a language that flatters us, that urges us to indulge ourselves, to get away from it all, to be unique by opting in, talking back, liking us on Facebook, leaving a review, sharing, retweeting, etc. "

" I think the way poems are taught to high school students is completely counterintuitive; it sets up this sense of being the poem's adversary. The poem is sort of sneakily trying to outsmart you. "

" I work with a lot of young people who have poems that are changing their lives, that they're eager to talk about, but every now and then when I meet someone, maybe someone of my parents' generation, and I tell them that I write poetry, they'll begin to recite something that they memorized when they were in school that has never left them. "

" Losing my father made me want to find out if I could come up with a version of God or the afterlife that I could feel like was acceptable now that both my parents are in it. "

" One of poetry's great effects, through its emphasis upon feeling, association, music, and image - things we recognize and respond to even before we understand why - is to guide us toward the part of ourselves so deeply buried that it borders upon the collective. "

" A poem, necessarily, sits at a register that's different from our usual conversational voices. You have to listen more actively to get to the heart of what's being said, what you as a reader or listener are being asked to feel or notice. "

" I wanted to write the kind of poetry that people read and remembered, that they lived by - the kinds of lines that I carried with me from moment to moment on a given day without even having chosen to. "

" What excites me is that I'm an ambassador for poetry, which is something that I wholeheartedly believe in and that has been an anchor and a force of stability and consolation throughout my life. I think that's good news. "

" I feel most alive, most electric with faith, breath, and courage, when I think of God as a current that runs through all that is. Not by will or by choice. Not as a benediction but because there are laws even God must obey. "

" Listening to music and lyrics and watching movies, I think, uses a lot of the same muscles we use in reading and experiencing poetry - and yet we somehow forget that we have those when it comes to sitting down with a book of poems. "

" I don't know how anyone can see the Hubble 'Deep Field' image and not feel like something else is going about its business out there. "

" As I've been teaching longer and longer, I realize I learn so much from the voices I'm naturally drawn to, the writers I love on an instinctive level - but I also learn so much from the writers that I have to work to grasp. "

" I had to say to myself, 'I haven't written enough about blackness, yet it's part of my consciousness and my lived experience.' I had to get over that anxiety of 'I haven't done this before.' "

" So much of my poetry begins with something that I can describe in visual terms, so thinking about distance, thinking about how life begins and what might be watching us. "

" My hope is to create spaces where people of all stripes can come together and speak at a lower decibel level. We make more sense that way. We sound more like our real selves that way. "

" Lately, I've been thinking about the difference between poetry and prose, and as I've experienced it, poetry is insistent. It allows for images and statements to operate in a single space and resonate powerfully without the application to be elaborated upon and narrated. "

" I have three kids, so children's literature is a big part of my life. "

" Rather than numbing or drowning out the difficult-to-describe but urgently sensed feelings that are part of being human, poetry invites us to tease them out, to draw them into language that is rooted in intricate thought and strange impulse. "

" I grew up in northern California in a town called Fairfield, which is kind of exactly between San Francisco and Sacramento, a small suburb. And I'm the youngest of five children. "

" One of my main wishes in wanting to write about my mother was to explore the impact of her death on my life, explore our relationship, think about the different versions of myself that I was with and without her. I also had the really strong wish to bring her to life for my children, who were born after she was gone. "

" I love the sense of looking at the sad, paltry, and yet very familiar spectacle that we must make from moment to moment in our lives, and in our frenzy, as something that's as out there as alien life. "

" I had written here and there about my mother in my poems. There are poems for her in my first and second books. "

" A question is a pursuit, an invitation to envision and explore a series of possibilities, to struggle and empathize and doubt and believe. The question moves, whereas our sense of what an answer is can often be static, a stopping point. "