For A Long Time, I Let My

When I Read Toni Morrison And Sandra Cisneros As A Freshman At Rutgers, It All Clicked - That Writing Was All I Wanted To Do. It Became My Calling.

I Know For A Fact That - It's Just The Way Our Biases Work Now In The Industry Of Literature, But Certainly A Short Story Collection Does Not Receive The Same Kind Of Attention As A Novel.

Do You Remember? When The Fights Seemed To Go On And On, And Always Ended With Us In Bed, Tearing At Each Other Like Maybe That Could Change Everything. In A Couple Of Months You'd Be Seeing Somebody Else And I Would Too; She Was No Darker Than You But She Washed Her Panties In The Shower And Had Hair Like A Sea Of Little Punos And The First Time You Saw Us, You Turned Around And Boarded A Bus I Knew You Didn't Have To Take. When My Girl Said, Who Was That? I Said, Just Some Girl.

Of Course We All Know That's Not How Life Works. The Novel That Is Our Life Can End At Any Time. Sometimes Even On Page One.

Like Most Lit Nerds, I'm A Voracious Reader. I Never Got Enough Poetry Under My Belt Growing Up But I Do Read It - Some Of My Favorites, Gina Franco And Angela Shaw And Cornelius Eady And Kevin Young, Remind Me Daily That Unless The Words Sing And Dance, What's The Use Of Putting Them Down On Paper.