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 Migration, and happen to be black, I'm trying to write a definitive account of the Great Migration, the so-called "black experience." That's not what I'm doing, and it can be frustrating.

The ways in which theological constructs pose questions about what it is to be a human being on this earth are deeply elegant and deeply interesting to me. I may not always agree with the answers religion offers, but I take great interest in the questions it poses.

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. As a child in church, I saw grown men at the altar crying out for God's mercy. And the idea of someone doing that has become a joke in the popular culture, but when you are there and you see it, you experience - for a moment - an incredibly raw, honest, strange insight into what it means to be a human being. Those experiences don't leave you. Whatever you think of them, they are powerful experiences.

I think that people have some sort of vision that everybody is moving towards perfection, and that there is some sort of set steps or something like that that you can move through to get to that place, and that that's sort of the project of being alive.

I like to say I had a very varied undergraduate education. I was an English major first, and then at the end of my college career I decided I was interested in urban planning. I became an urban studies major, with a minor in poetry. I don't think I knew what I was looking for in my early twenties, but I know I kept not finding it.

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.

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