Friendship is such an important thing to me, and I feel like the people who I love and help keep me whole - I can't imagine a life without them.

My family is big, complicated, and beautiful - and keeps me smiling and whole. It's so important to have family, whether it's biological family, good friends, foster families, or a group of aunties who are raising you. The idea of feeling isolated is scary to me - to walk through the world alone would be heartbreaking.

For my family, 'black-ish' is the reward on a Thursday evening - a day after the show officially airs, when it's finally available to be streamed.

'Brown Girl Dreaming' was a book I had a lot of doubts about - mainly, would this story be meaningful to anyone besides me? My editor, Nancy Paulsen, kept assuring me, but there were moments when I was in a really sad place with the story for so many reasons. It wasn't an easy book to write - emotionally, physically, or creatively.

When I was a kid, I got in trouble for lying a lot, and I had a teacher say, 'Instead of lying, write it down, because if you write it down, it's not a lie anymore; it's fiction.'

Sometimes, when I'm sitting at my desk for long hours and nothing's coming to me, I remember my fifth-grade teacher, the way her eyes lit up when she said, 'This is really good.'

To be poet laureate is to try to spread the love and the accessibility of poetry to young people.

As a person of color, as a woman, as a body moving through this particular space in time, I realize the streets of New York tell the story of resistance, an African-American history of brilliance and beauty that, even in its most brutal moments, did not - could not - kill our resilient and powerful spirit.

When I'm feeling frustrated with a story, I have faith that it's going to come. Also, when I first started writing, I wanted to write the stories that were not in my childhood, to represent people who hadn't historically been represented in literature.