“In first grade, I was lucky enough to discover books. I really feel like they saved my life.  I grew up in a working-class family in Chicago, and I spent most of my life in situations where it didn’t feel safe to say I was a poet. Once I learned to read, I didn’t stop. I just read and read and read. My home was the worst place in the world, but my room was my little haven. After school, I’d walk to the library without my mother knowing and spend hours there. Then, when I was 15, I was institutionalized. The bars on the inside of the hospital windows made it impossible to open them, so I didn’t see any sunlight while I was there. It was hell for me.  The only book I had with me was Leaves of Grass by the 19th-century poet Walt Whitman. That’s what saved me. It was a beautiful thing to realize that everything’s connected and that, through writing, we are all talking to each other across time.  When I got out a few weeks later, I had a profound moment when I knew: I am a poet. Ther...