I don't claim to say, "All black women are like me," because they're not.

In grad school, a friend and I gave ourselves the task of writing poems in the voice of Beyoncé and Lady Gaga after they did the collaboration for "Telephone." I just kind of kept going. That was quite a while ago - Beyoncé meant something very different then than she does now.

Sometimes it's just rejecting stereotypes, sometimes it's creating work. Sometimes it's just blocking out the noise.

There was something about Beyoncé that felt like a vessel, I guess, that I could kind of impose all of these feelings and thoughts onto. I was drawn to a little bit of a dichotomy between the glamour and celebrity and the very deep and complex legacy of black women, and what that means in terms of performance.

I try to convey what it feels like and sounds like and smells like and looks like inside of my particular skin, to move through the world as a black American woman in her mid-twenties.

There's so much about the strong black woman stereotype that makes us forget that we do need and deserve help and care.

I'm not reading any kind of fantasy [for young adults] or Hunger Games or anything like that. It's more just like geeks with crushes. It's very sweet, and I'm enjoying how honest they are, and I'm enjoying the humanity in them.