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, 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.

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.

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 people exist in this country because of the Great Migration. That's nation-building.

One of the things that writers worry about is finding a voice. I don't think it's a thing that you find so much as it is something that comes to you, or that presents itself.

The critics and the reviewers are more frightening than anything else!

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 Experience," though undoubtedly there was one once.

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 than that, there's also been an explosion of a very wealthy black class in the United States, but those people are often treated as special cases: they're athletes, entertainers. Jay-Z. Basketball players. The country metabolizes the fact these rich black people exist, but it seems only to reinforce the idea that every other black person is limping along in poverty.