I’ve kept an idea journal for as long as I can remember. Whenever a word, sentence or story idea strikes my fancy, I jot it down and date the entry.

One day, I thumbed through the pages, noticing dates on e […]

Wedding in Richmond
 

they’re roasting a pig at Tuckahoe Plantation
crowds gather on the grounds
where little Thomas Jefferson once lived
sweet jasmine tangles in the garden
banjos play on the […]

Just like the adage about loving yourself before being able to love another person, I’ve come to understand that in order to write with depth, you first have to learn to write about yourself. I grew up in a […]

Michael fled his village in South Sudan at the age of five. He trekked a thousand miles through war zones to arrive at a series of refugee camps where he lived for a decade. As a child at Kukuma Refugee Camp, […]

Snow Falls Off Bare Branch
 
At a reading, the poet responds to the art
of the Japanese woodblock. But I only see
the man’s head blocking my view,

white hair combed counterclockwise, hiding
terrain wh […]

Sitting on my desk right now, asking for attention more ardently than any of the other chores I ought to be doing—such as my own writing, or, for example, this blog—are these two beautiful books of poetry. The […]

As the new poetry editor of Streetlight, I find myself caught between the delights and demands of poetry and the nightmare of current events happening here in our nation and globally. I want to attempt to answer a […]