"I do not talk about my feelings. That's what poetry is for." Poetry for me is sharing my private feelings in a public setting. My well-polished and severely edited private feelings. :)

I'm working on a couple of different things, one of them being another poetry collection entitled, As I Write to You. It's about my current relationship. It's a lot edgier than Dear Lover, and I believe, shows growth in my maturity.

Maya Angelou, Simon Armitage, J.K. Rowling, J.D. Robb, Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allen Poe

Food mostly. Most everything else I can do in bed: drawing, painting, knitting, typing, I can do in bed. But I have to leave the bed to go get food.

Going to the ceramics studio, also. I love doing wheel work. So that gets me out of bed. I also like hanging out at parks when it's warm outside and writing or sketching or napping in the sun.

I start with the poetry. I write the poetry, edit it, obsess over it, scribble it down in the middle of the night, and then a title will eventually come to mind for a group of poems. I will to some doodles that complement the title, lots and lots of doodles, before asking an artist to improve upon my doodles.

That's difficult. I love to read. I'd say Order of the Phoenix from the Harry Potter series. I really loved A Little Princess. A Walk to Remember was fabulous. My Lady Mistress. The Norton Anthology of African-American Poetry and Literature. I chose the first four because they are love stories. The 5th Harry Potter is about the love Harry has for his godfather. A Little Princess--the love for her father. My Lady Mistress is a romance novel of desperately, horribly wonderful romantic love, and the Norton Anthology has some of the most moving pieces I've ever read about black culture and history. It was a very informative and painful read. Reading about black history is painful to me because of all of the horrors that others had to endure.

Romance novels, poetry, murder mysteries.

I am a faithful Kindle girl. I love my Kindle.

I actually don't have a "desk" right now. I have a rocking chair with art and half-finished sweaters piled on it, a bookshelf with stacks of fabric, a loveseat with yarn and a keyboard, but no desk.

I started writing when I was in third grade. I did journal writing back then and then, short stories and bits of poetry. Now, I more or less, exclusively write poetry, though I have written a couple of short stories and plays for courses in college.

Love. Love is the story. Specifically, heartbreak. The poetry collection started off as a lot of poems about relationships that went sour very quickly. Not in a "things just fell apart" kind of sour. The kind of sour that people watch Lifetime movies about. Men who visit you everyday and spend hours talking to you and then just vanish. Men who manipulate you with outrageous rants and arguments and harsh words, followed by tears and declarations of "I love you but, you're this, and you're that, and I want you to be different." And also, accusations. I learned that accusations are a form of manipulation, and I write about that in the book, too.

I like to knit and crochet. I run an Etsy craft store with one of my friends, who is also a poet. I also play piano and love to read. Sometimes, I'll go for long walks at night (if it's warm enough), or go draw in the park or at a cafe.

A lot of the time, they are things that have been recommended to me based on other things I've read (through Amazon or Goodreads). Sometimes though, I'll just look through a genre I feel up to reading with a certain subject matter, for example, "romance" and "pirates", then scroll through and browse until something looks interesting.

I like to do a variety of things. Sometimes, inspiration will just strike me, and I'll write a lot for an hour, or a day, or a week. Nothing is set in stone for me. Sometimes, I do freewrites and set a timer for 10 or 15 minutes, and write until the timer goes off. There are also days where I'm up to trying a formal poem and will set about that by writing in the form first, (ABAB CDCD, or whichever form and rhyme scheme) and fiddle with that.

I'm from Memphis, Tennessee. The strongest influence growing up there had on me is that I incessantly remind myself to be open-minded. There are so many closed-minded and hyper-conservative people back home, and I found that constricting. I would never want my writing to be able to be shoved into one small box. I want all different types of people to be able to relate to what I write and to find strength or inspiration in my writings.