Should I be collaborating with artists of color solely because of their race and my politics? This question is weighted with my own worry that I have been invited to speak or collaborate solely because of my race, and not because of my abilities.

I think white artists have a responsibility to be not only naming white supremacy, but to be using their power and privilege to support artists of color.

Of course, I can't separate my queerness from my brownness - if anything, my queerness amplifies my brownness, and vice versa - but I spent so much of my early twenties trying to erase my differences, often without awareness of what I was doing.

When I wouldn't leave home without my blue contacts or when I was bleaching my hair, I didn't have the language to articulate that I was trying to assimilate to whiteness. If anything, I was trying to "look normal."

I tend to focus less on genre as a starting point and more on idea or intention and let the idea dictate genre.

I don't yet know what style will be required for my next novel, but my sense is that each book will involve a new relationship to language.

In poetry, I didn't have to provide resolution. I could ask hard questions without feeling responsible for the answers.