I think writing is an act of remembrance, I think that Instagram is an act of remembrance, and I think curating a show is an act of memory, too.

Challenging is good, like good conversation, yes? Who wants to have dinner with the same old easy listening music sounding friends all the time?

Every time I put a collection together I'd scrap it because there was no "meaning," until I wrote about the two black men - friends - in the beginning of the book. So much of their experience was ABOUT trying to find friends in the authors/artists I wrote about - subjects that were/are a source of comfort, somehow, since none of them "fit," either

Inspiration takes many forms, but it's rarely pure.

Claudia Rankine's Citizen comes at you like doom. It's the best note in the wrong song that is America. Its various realities-'mistaken' identity, social racism, the whole fabric of urban and suburban life-are almost too much to bear, but you bear them, because it's the truth. Citizen is Rankine's Spoon River Anthology, an epic as large and frightening and beautiful as the country and various emotional states that produced it.

Who says reading should be easy? Shouldn't it challenge you as hard sometimes as love. Maybe "hard" is not the right word in this context. Ha!

For black people, being around white people is sometimes like taking care of babies you don't like, babies who throw up on you again and again, but whom you cannot punish, because they're babies.