Editor Patrice Vecchione: Hi, I'm Patrice Vecchione, and my new book is an anthology of poetry. It's actually a book of 64 authors. It's called Ink Knows No Borders: Poems of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience.

So I'm the lead editor of the book, and it is also edited by Alyssa Raymond. The forward to the book is by Javier Zamora, and the afterword is by Emtithal Mahmoud.

This book, the idea for it came originally a long time ago, almost an embarrassingly long time ago. It was after 9/11 when I was aware of how horribly Americans were treating other Americans, immigrants, and non-immigrants. And, because of that, I thought we need poetry to speak to this issue from poets who are immigrants themselves or whose parents or grandparents came to this country.

Then the idea went on the back burner because I had other projects. After the current Presidential election and the behavior on the part of our government since then, I needed to channel my own anger and sorrow, and creating this book became the most effective avenue for that that I could think of.

The book has an arc to it. It begins with poems of leaving home, from the younger child's point of view, and moves into arrival and growing up and becoming a teenager and a young adult.

What my hope is for educators and all readers of Ink Knows No Borders is that it deepens and broadens one's understanding of the immigrant experience. Of course, as a country, we're nothing but immigrants, no matter how far back we may have to look. My grandfather came here from poverty in Southern Italy, so I don't have far to look, but we are a country made up of people from so many parts of the world, and what poetry can do is personalize an experience that has become so terribly politicized.

In Ink Knows No Borders, you read poems of people learning a new language and wanting to forget their own and wanting to embrace their own language. There are poems of racism and poems of righteousness. The poem in here called "Frank's Nursery and Crafts" by Bao Phi is a story of vindication when his mother is given the wrong change online at a nursery, and then the manager comes out and has to correct the error.

There's a poem in here by Mohja Kahf in which her grandmother washes her feet in the bathroom sink at Sears, and for her it's a completely natural thing but, of course, for the white American, it's a completely unacceptable thing.

So you get that sense in this book of awkwardness and integration. An overall arching theme in this collection is one of determination, strength, resilience, imagination, and creativity.

Through the process of doing this book, I learned so much. It made the immigrant experience very specific. I couldn't have my generalities anymore.