I'm lucky. I've worked with extremely talented women who won't sacrifice comedy to make themselves look better.

After my parents' divorce in the early seventies, I grew up with my mother, who wasn't super educated herself. But there were a lot of kids from the subcontinent in the neighbourhood, many of whom were academic achievers. So my sister and I grew up around them, and both of us did well in school.

In Bosnia, little children shot in the head by a guy who thinks it's okay to aim his gun at a child.

Writing about what happened to my brother and to my family was awful. It was hard to look back at how much suffering there was and at how certain bad situations were made worse by our decisions.

Coming from a very inarticulate family made me try to speak for those who can't express themselves and created a need for articulation at its most ceremonial - poetry.