Part of the role of the writer is to encourage other people to discover their voices. - Naomi Shihab Nye

There was a door in the heart
that had no lock on it.

I suggest that blood be bigger than what we're born with, that blood keep growing and growing as we live; otherwise how will we become true citizens of the world? For twenty years, working as a visiting writer in dozens of schools in my city and elsewhere. I have carried poems by writers of many cultures into classrooms, feeling the large family of voices linking human experience. We have no borders when we read.

The things that cause you friction are the things from which you might make art. Surely losing is one of the most endemic frictions of our journey.