My mother is a fighter. After she battled polio and learned to walk again, the doctors told her she would be a cripple her entire life. Instead of accepting defeat, she refused this fate and went on to become the West African Womens Singles tennis champion in college.

My only want and wish, really, was to tell a good story. I wanted to do good work, tell a good story, and give the character a voice. Those were my only expectations.

I think there's something really thrilling to having to get people laughing about something and then when you have them in that comfort space, you can drop the weight into the texture of the story.

I ran track in high school very competitively, and then ran it D-1 at Boston University. I ran there on an athletic scholarship and chose BU because they had both a good track program and an arts program.

If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky and Michelangelo and Dostoyevsky, they can learn to say Uzoamaka.

I loved Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi. Its about a first-generation African family living in America that has to return home to Nigeria when their estranged father passes away.

It's exciting to watch people do and write and say what they feel like doing, writing and saying.