When I think about being shaped as a storyteller and the things that kind of nurtured me to become a writer, my first memories are about poetry and how poetry is a way of storytelling. And I grew up listening to poetry, listening to poets recite poems. I grew up in a Black Baptist church where folks would get up and recite scripture and poems. And so my first love is poetry and the idea that language can take you places, that language can put on record your family’s history, your family’s story, all of that was nurtured in me as a child. And music I grew up with always a record spinning in the background. Saturday was for cleaning, and there was always music on. There was always music in the car. So music was a big part of my life. And the storytelling through poetry was a big part of my life, especially childhood.
And so I gravitated to music and to poems. I recited them, I wrote them. I had journals full of poems when I was a kid. And I think that’s when I first started to find my voice and think about what I wanted to say and what I wanted to write about. So the poems of Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, Lucille Clifton, those are the poets who I always say, they nurtured me and mothered me and anchored me. It was it. Those are the books and the poets where I first saw my reflection, it wasn’t so much literature like books, novels, but poetry was when I felt like, oh, they’re speaking to me. They’re speaking about me. They’re speaking about my family and my neighborhood. So I felt completely seen reading those poets, and that has absolutely influenced the way that I write.