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 child. The hymns. The sermons. I can still vividly hear the sermons and the pieces of soft piano music played after them, the preacher asking if anyone wanted to come up to the altar and accept Christ as their savior.
Ayana MathisIn 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, this is an Asian book. It can be counterproductive both to the literary enterprise and to people's reading, because it can set up barriers. Readers may think, "Oh, I'm a straight man from Atlanta and I'm white, so I won't enjoy that book because it's by a gay black woman in Brooklyn." They're encouraged to think that, in a way, because of the categorization in the media.
Ayana MathisI think that if you just write your characters you end up with something that people can access.
Ayana MathisIf 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 people exist in this country because of the Great Migration. That's nation-building.
Ayana Mathis