The Dark Room reading series, which featured such poets as 1992 Nobel Prize-winner Derek Walcott, met from 1988 to 1994, first in the Inman Street living room and later at the Institute of Contemporary Art and the Boston University Playwrights' Theatre. She heard poets Thylias Moss and Yusef Komunyakaa, who sparked her desire to take her own writing more seriously, and she found inspiration from reading African American women writers Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, and Toni Morrison, whom Strange considers a poet. The young people who were attending The Dark Room readings began sharing and critiquing their own writing, and soon formed a collective. The collective continued meeting until 1998. Strange now lives in Washington, DC, where she teaches poetry, literature, and government to high school students and continues to enjoy the company of several writers she met through the collective.
Community is a recurring theme in Strange's poetry.
She also grew up with a strong sense of spirituality. This piercing look at family relations occurs frequently in Strange's writing, where characters often convey bitterness or sadness about the past. She curses this wound of old hurt, betrayal of the past revisited. Yet these explosive feelings are stated with great emotional reserve. Strange explores, and ultimately contains, the relationships she describes in her poetry.