When Sonia Sotomayor was little, really little, her grandmother would host to get together pretty much

every Saturday night at her tenement apartment in the South Bronx.

While the grown-ups did their thing, the future Supreme Court justice and her cousin would hide out under the coffee table to avoid bedtime and to eavesdrop.

And so I got to hear the conversations, to listen to the music, to listen to my

grandmother and my phone father somewhere in the middle of the night get up to

recite poetry.

And they would recite poems that were paragraph longs from memory.

And it was always a sort of competition, who was most dramatic, who could say it in a way that would engage people the most.

And there'd be a lot of clamping and stamping of feet when they finished.

And I didn't understand all the words because at least at that age I was still grappling with learning English and my Spanish was a child Spanish and these

were grown-up poems but they're rhythm.

The depth of my grandmother and father's passion in reciting them.

They gave me a lifelong love of two things.

Words and reading.

Because words are so... words and reading.

Because words are so powerful.

They're instruments that can take anyone

to where they want to go.

I tell kids all the time through reading I escaped the bad parts of my life in the

South Bronx. I would run to the library whenever I could and needed a place to hide.

And through books I got to travel the world and the universe.

I am still a lover of science fiction.

...