Black culture is very difficult to explain to people who don't have any direct contact with it.

Black culture is very difficult to explain to people who don't have any direct contact with it.

I never really had novel-writing instruction like people do in MFA programs.

I've spent my entire adult life teaching at colleges of various kinds, all of them very different from Yale, and I have a fairly cynical perspective on what elite institutions - and the privileges they embody - represent in America.

Yale's endowment became a metaphor for the kind of training it offered its graduates, namely, how to exploit the global marketplace, and technology, for your own interests, while maintaining a smokescreen of virtuous intent.

The hip-hop that I really connected with was Public Enemy, KRS-One, Ice Cube, and N.W.A. That late '80s and early '90s era. The beginning of gangster rap and the beginning of politically conscious rap. I had a very immature, adolescent feeling of, "Wow, I can really connect with these people through the stories they're telling in this music."

It was always a false assumption that white American writers cannot write novels about race unless they're approaching it from a very oblique angle.