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.

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.

Hip-hop is mostly what I listen to, other than jazz. I've given up on pop music and indie rock.

The truth is that an intellectual life is available to almost anyone, almost anywhere, if they work hard enough and are given some kind of access point.

Narrative stories are nothing but models of karma and causality - how one thing leads to another. And a lot of narrative fiction is about causality that we don't immediately understand.

Not unlike gender reassignment surgery, someone determines that they are of a different race on the inside and they wish to surgically correct that.

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