“My mother is a fighter. After she battled polio and learned to walk again, the doctors told her she would be a cripple her entire life. Instead of accepting defeat, she refused this fate and went on to become the West African Women's Singles tennis champion in college.”
“I ran track in high school very competitively, and then ran it D-1 at Boston University. I ran there on an athletic scholarship and chose BU because they had both a good track program and an arts program.”
“When I was little, I didn't smile much. Don't get me wrong. I was a happy kid, but I couldn't stand the space, dead center, in between my teeth. Yeah, I could whistle through it, but so what? That didn't win me many points on the playground in Medfield, Massachusetts.”
“When it comes to inmates, we have boiled them down to just the few things we know about them - their crime, their current life situation, their identification number. But the reality is they were something before they were their crime.”
“I dream in color, and I have visions of feelings and energies that I would love to feel.”
“I kept hiding my smile in pictures throughout middle school and most of high school until picture day came my senior year.”
“In performance, you don't always feel that sort of family bond right off the top. It sort of develops and grows over time.”
“I've heard of nothing coming from nothing, but I've never heard of absolutely nothing coming from hard work.”
“I loved 'Ghana Must Go' by Taiye Selasi. It's about a first-generation African family living in America that has to return home to Nigeria when their estranged father passes away.”
“I think there's something really thrilling to having to get people laughing about something, and then, when you have them in that comfort space, you can drop the weight into the texture of the story.”