I take mentoring very seriously and I am on the board of an organization called Girls Write Now, where we match teen girls and writing mentors because it changes their lives.

Dwelling on pain, spending too much time immersed in it, tasting its flavors, fingering its textures--this makes it only more potent.

I guess this is how love is when it comes undone. No matter how tight you knit the stitches, a sharp tug on a loose thread will transform your warm sweater into a mangled heap of yarn that you can't reuse or repair.

The adolescent protagonist is one of the hallmarks of American literature.

I was kind of an invisible girl when I was young.

I am always urging my students to honor their writing practice, to set up a schedule.

My first novel, Leaving Atlanta, took at look at my hometown in the late 1970s, when the city was terrorized by a serial murderer that left at least 29 African-American children dead.