Brooklyn taught her to listen.
Criminology taught her why.

Yolanda Kinlock was raised in Brooklyn. That sentence does a lot of work, and she won’t decorate it. The borough teaches volume, timing, and the difference between a story that happened and a story that is being performed. Both kinds walk into a novel — only one of them should be allowed to run it.

LaGuardia gave her business administration. John Jay gave her criminology. She didn’t sit in those rooms to print the degrees on a book flap; she went because she wanted language for the systems — money, law, motive — that already ran the lives she was watching. Criminology is useful to a novelist in a way workshops sometimes are not. It trains you to ask what a person needed, what they told themselves, what the scene looked like from the hallway. It also trains you not to fall in love with your own theory. A theory that cannot survive a real kitchen is just rhetoric.

The writing started young and never agreed to leave. Articles first, then poems, then the longer work — Sooper Articles, Ezine, Grief Digest, Poem Hunter, and the other walls where a poem can stand without a publicist. None of it was a ladder she pretended was destiny. It was reps. You write until the sentence can carry the thing you actually mean.

She writes the things we bury because the belief that your disaster is custom-made is a kind of loneliness — and loneliness is a liar. Someone else is living a version of it. Characters arrive in her head and she builds them by watching people; humor, in her work, isn’t the opposite of pain but the thing that keeps it bearable long enough to be told.

Do we judge people for their actions, or do we show compassion for their transgressions? I will not answer it for you. I will not let you skip it.