In my contemporary stories, I write about today's quilters, inventive techniques they use, and how technology has influenced their art. Novels set in the past let me have fun researching patterns that were popular and fabrics and tools available to quilters through history.

Sometimes the most ordinary things are the ones we learn to miss the most.

When I was working on my first novel, 'The Quilter's Apprentice,' I knew I wanted to write about friendship, especially women's friendship and how women use friendship to sustain themselves and nurture each other.

People need stories...we use stories to teach, to learn, to make sense of the world around us. As long as we need stories, we will need books.

What I would give, I thought, to have been present as Elizabeth Keckley measured Mary Lincoln for a new gown, to overhear their conversations on topics significant and ordinary, to observe the Lincoln White House from such an intimate perspective. From that moment, my interest in their remarkable friendship was captivated, and it never really waned.

One can never had too many librarian friends.

Elizabeth Keckley was a woman of remarkable strength, courage, perseverance, and dignity. She was exceptionally talented, but also very diligent and ambitious, and together those qualities enabled her to deliver herself from slavery and become a successful businesswoman.