“Carmen's speciality is national news, and her greatest pleasure is finding inconsistencies in the declarations of politicians: syntactical errors, and – why not? – howlers. The one she has the most fun with is the mayor. Someone who can't speak shouldn't be in charge of a city, she's always saying. And, far from being elitist, her observation alludes to the obvious contempt a certain affluent social class – from which the mayor hails – feels for language (words, meaning, syntax, conjugation, use of prepositions, solipsisms) and which she, a secondary-teacher of language and literature for more than thirty years, refuses to countenance.”

“And as light as the rain seems, it still rains down on you.”

“I love the romance in Kimberly Derting's 'The Body Finder.' 'Cold Kiss' by Amy Garvey is unbelievably touching - and about so much more than just romantic love.”

“A lot of people feel that the realm of poetry and the realm of the lyric is personal feeling and should rise above politics, which, in fact, good poetry has never done.”

“The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings.”

“Trust in yourself.”

“Trust in yourself. Your perceptions are often far more accurate than you are willing to believe.”

“I design for myself and the first question I ask is, 'Would I wear it?'”

“I think sports is one of the places where race plays itself out publicly. Although we pretend it doesn't.”

“It's not the things you don't know that trip you up. It's the things you think you know, but you don't. You fail to ask a certain question because you believe you know the answer. Separating your information from your assumptions can be very tricky business.”

“I try to extract something positive from [every] situation even if it's just learning not to make the same mistake twice.”