Nikki Grimes: Hi. I'm Nikki Grimes, author of Ordinary Hazards: A Memoir. Ordinary Hazards is a memoir I always knew I wanted to write. I always felt it was the single most important story that I have to tell. It took me 39 years to finally finish it.

I went through a process of first writing a collection of short stories and then I put them away in the file and forgot about them. And then some years later, I wrote a collection of personal essays. I thought that might be the way that I would tell this story, and then I filed those away, forgot about them.

And then I wrote a collection of poems, which I called Memory Traces, and I thought maybe that would be the way that I would tell it and I put those away.

And then eventually I started to tell the story from scratch and I didn't know if it was going to be poetry or prose. But poetry is my second language, and so it felt organic to tell the story in that way.

And so it's a memoir written in verse. There are passages of prose, but it's primarily verse. And one of the things that I got to do with this book that I didn't imagine I would do is talk about memory itself. The mystery of memory because that's what memoir is based on.

And so the excerpt I'd like to read for you is the Mystery of Memory, Number Two.

Trauma is a memory hog. It gobbles up all available space in the brain, leaves little room to mark daily happenstances or even routine injuries, which are less than life threatening. Innocuous classroom feuds? Gone. Who pulled whose hair during fire drills? Couldn't tell you. The name of the new teacher in the new school, the mascot and location of which were singularly unremarkable? Don't even ask.

The bloody parade of painful days have ground such sweet details into the fine layer of dark dust, blown away by time, leaving me with a multiplicity of blank spots.

But don't worry, I bridged the gaps with suspension cables, forged of steely gratitude for having survived my past at all.