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

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.

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.

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 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.

Only when you leave do you appreciate what binds American people and our cultural experience together.