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.

The politics of transgender identity are really complicated. And the debate over how much of gender is biological and how much of it is socially constructed is a very complex debate.

I had a lot of expectations placed on me because I was already having some success with my short stories. That was not a good situation to be in. That by itself took a long time to overcome.

The impact of black music and black art forms on American culture is really difficult to appreciate.

I had observed people whose identity crises around race seemed analogous to other people's identity crises around gender.

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.