Eliot said that "genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." What he meant by that is, the emotional understanding comes before you unde….

I'm interested in someone who's mired in grief: how do you get back to that thing that makes them warm? Because you know that's in there..

Once I became historically aware, I realized there are these formative moments of history tied around tragedy and disaster and sacrifice, that led pe….

I love the fact that I can go to a museum now that tells me I'm in the postmodern age..

I usually feel something before I know it..

People seem very comfortable having a kind of Cheesecake Factory-type of life..

Magical realism as a declaration in the text is usually when someone can't speak and then they must be magically reinvigorated in some way..

I can't stay engaged for years with a book unless it has feelings. It can't be an idea for me - it has to be a felt thing..

If you're just mired in privilege, there's nothing to learn; learning appears to be over..

Much of the visualizing is imaginative..

I try to be even-handed and fair-minded about my view of history. I don't romanticize one side and demonize the other, though I do think that if you'….

If you created a place in air where they're breathing and running around in, and then they speak in that fictional milieu, it's perfectly authenticat….

If you die without agency as a child, but you have agency in your body [in the novel], how is it to be enacted unless it is being reimagined by a wri….

I think poetry can lead to policy, and I can hear the laughter when I say that..

At bottom, I'm a cheerful person..

To close the empathetic gap, you really want to get the person emotionally identifying [with your subject and characters], and then when you do that,….

Because I write intuitively and image-by-image and moment-by-moment, my writing has to be powered by feelings and emotions..

There's an imperative to make sure you distinguish fiction from the fact, because if the fact is doing the work, why did you do fiction? And once you….

I was on the wrong side of colonization. My ancestry is mostly mired in having the colonial experience as colonized subjects, first as slaves and the….

People who are suffering have to visualize ways out of tragedy to actually get out of it..

Bruce Lee, before he fought, he would try to visualize how the fight would go, because he was visualizing a victorious path out of the combat..