Snowboarding allows you to create your own path, and for me it was awesome because no one was telling me what to do. I could go out on the mountain and try new things and learn for myself.

The nation as the horizon of an identity that you want to come into being as a fundamental absence of something that is compromised, something that needs to be rescued or made - these matters preoccupy the third world writer. It is seductive for a Marxist understanding of literary practice and production in the sense that it says that material culture determines literary output.

Snowboarding allows you to create your own path, and for me it was awesome because no one was telling me what to do. I could go out on the mountain and try new things and learn for myself.

Stay excited and stay humble and good things will come.

Making of poetry, music, dance and art as culture-making in the service of nation-making. You can find writings that make that purpose for art quite explicit.

My intention is not to repudiate an African American identity but perhaps to resist how labels take hold, or to make it as slow a process as possible. That's more my sense of it.

The best thing you can do is to keep riding your snowboard and love what you're doing. Without a passion for the sport it's difficult to take your riding to the next level.