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

There's been a lot of talk about black men and the presence and absence of black men in positions of power in American culture.

You think about every piece of idiomatic speech adopted by white men over the past ten or twenty years; virtually all of it comes from hip-hop.

For me, there's a very clear parallel between the practice of insight in Buddhism and what's called prajna - the insight that arrives through meditation.

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.

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

My parents didn't really restrict my movement, so I got involved in the underground music scene and the activism scene; I was doing some volunteering in food relief. I spent a lot of time throughout the city in poor areas, even though my family lived in a wealthy area.