When you achieve it fully, you create something that's transparent - that people can move into and through their own experiences. As a writer, I don't want people spending time thinking, "What does she mean?" I want, in a way, my text to go away. So that the words on the page become a door to one's own internal investigation. It's just a passage. If the work does its job, it just opens.

I was at Yale and I said to the poet Elizabeth Alexander, "I'm interested in the ways in which black health seems precarious in the United States." She introduced me to the term "John Henryism." And then I went back and researched it and understood that, woah, this thing I am thinking about is actually a condition that's named.

I don't really agree with the role model thing. People are always saying that athletes shouldn't do X or Y because they are role models.

The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.

People expect black women to be angry, irrationally so, without reason. They think we are animals and we go around like the Wild Things.

Because white men can’t police their imaginations, black men are dying.

I am invested in keeping present the forgotten bodies.