My book has a pre - civil rights setting with a post - civil rights sensibility. I believe less and less that there is something called "The Black Ex….

Voice isn't fixed or unmalleable, it adapts to the characters you are creating and the story being told. I suppose in some way that's true in life - ….

I think a lot about race and the burdens of representation. There's an idea that because I'm writing a book set around the time of the Great Migratio….

There is still an assumption among many people that to be black is to be lower class. In the last fifteen to twenty years, perhaps even further back ….

In America, and no doubt elsewhere, we have such a tendency toward the segregation of cultural products. This is a black book, this is a gay book, th….

There's a stereotype that to be a strong black woman is to be strong about being black..

I've been writing all my life. Even though I didn't have sort of careerist aspirations as a writer, it was very much my identity..

I started writing the book without realizing I was writing a book. That sounds stupid, but it's true. I'd been trying and failing to make a different….

By sixteen I thought, "Ah, this is all crap, you're all sheep, I'm not going to church, leave me alone." And then at a certain point in my teens I st….

I try to find the beauty in things. On dark days, I sit in my armchair looking at clouds and I am awed at how rain is made..

Certainly I had from an early age a sense of the power and beauty of religious texts - the awesome magnitude of the Bible stories I was reading as a ….

If there had never been the Great Migration there would never have been jazz, there would never have been Michelle Obama. A lot of amazing black peop….

I think that the project of being alive is to be alive. So there will always be twists and turns and steps forward and steps back, but that's just yo….

There were class differences among black people then and there are class differences among black people now. There is still an assumption among many ….

One thing I am learning is to slow down. Multitasking is great, but I when try to do everything at warp speed I just end up with typos and stress..

All of us, writers and non-writers alike, have incredible well-springs of personal experience and history. And we also have imagination - which I thi….

Fiction writing is an act of imagination, lived experience is secondary in many ways, writing a novel really is all about inventing worlds and people..

A belief in God may not be fully within me anymore, but there's still a belief in belief. The high drama and power of the Church has stayed with me. ….

I think that if you just write your characters you end up with something that people can access..

Racial terrorism affects the lives of white people and black people and everyone, everything. Racism is contaminating. It can affect the dogs in the ….

You have to find a way of shutting the future out and focusing on the writing. One of the problems I'll have with writing my second book is getting b….