Mothers have always held such symbolic weight in determining a person's worth. Your mother tongue, your motherland, your mother's values - these things can qualify or disqualify you from attaining myriad American dreams: love, fluency, citizenship, legitimacy, acceptance, success, freedom.

If you were to make a quick judgment call on my intelligence and articulation when I first moved to the U.S. based on my speaking skills, it would be very low.

I went to school in California, at Stanford when I was seventeen, and I lived in San Francisco until I was twenty-three, and then I lived in Hungary for, like, a summer, and then I went to Iowa for three years. At Iowa, I actually did the fiction program, not poetry. I was a fiction writer for a long time before I was 'out' as a poet.

Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner, who founded Lenny Books together, also happen to have exquisite reading tastes - from obscure small press poetry chapbook to dishy memoirs to literary novels - and so it's a real honor that they've chosen to announce their imprint with my stories.

I just submitted what I had to the 'Octopus Books' contest open reading period, and they said they wanted to publish my poetry book. Then I started to publish more and more poetry because people would ask me to do readings or ask me submit something for their journal.

Poetry was my dirty little secret when I was a fiction writer at Iowa, and then fiction became my dirty little secret when I started writing more poetry and working for 'Rookie'.

The historical legacy of 'The Best American Poetry' is they've had very few editors who were not white. They've had very few instances where they've selected poems by non-white poets.

People who have very devastating lives sometimes have the most wild, avant-garde humor. It's like when you've seen it all and been through it all, nothing is off-limits in a way.

I think it was really important for me before I 'debuted myself' in front of the world to have a private life with my imagination and my writing for several years. That also made it so I didn't feel desperate for someone to find me.