I'm interested in how the confessional is so abrasively critiqued today. I'm not really comfortable with simply confessing but I do think "confessing" is a major part of reckoning.

I'm an obsessive writer who needs and loves revision. Writing helps me learn and helps me teach.

Long Division has a lot of Afrosurrealist impulses. I think the book was more Afrofuturist when it was like 700 pages.

One of the problems with a lot of "confessional" writing is that it starts and stops with the confessional and doesn't really tie the "I" into a "we" at all. I'm still surprised at how mad critics get at that kind of confessional writing.

First of all, the novel should be a critique of the novels that have come before it in a language that broadens the audience of American literature. Second, it's really got to be invested in a number of what-if questions.

I wanted to create a book that was unafraid of black bodies, yet super interested in thinking about the relationship of love to body and sexuality without relying on tired understandings of "gay" "bi" or "straight."

Black is not a vice. Nor is segregation a virtue.