I was honored, earlier this month, to be named Houston’s poet laureate. My work is rooted in this city, and in the lives my family and I have made here. I am a Houston native, and generations of my family were born and raised in Houston since the early 1900s. My great grandfather, Florencio Martinez Contreras, owned a blacksmith shop where the current Downtown Aquarium now stands. My great-aunts, Della and Dionnes, were artists — one a pianist, the other a painter (Dionnes actually painted the flowers on the panels surrounding the room of the Ideson building) — and their brothers, including...