Organizer is kind of a grand term for what I was doing.

I always wrote; my first story was published in the magazine The American Girl when I was 11

I'm at the atheist end of the agnostic spectrum.

Hard to remember who is more dangerous: the people who are attacking our liberties overseas, or those who are suppressing them at home.

These events are swirling around them. In the white community, people felt like they had no control over their neighborhoods, their destiny. In the black community, centuries of government and economic forces were pushing on them. I went in with a kind of arrogance, maybe, that came from living in a very intellectual family, and I left knowing that there was a lot about the way people lived that I didn't know about.

I had wanted to write Ghost Country for a long time, but it wouldn't work.

Sometimes life seems so painful it hurts even to move my arms.