Music is my first love, where my artistic journey began.

Despite the fact that I'm not highly skilled in any visual art, aesthetics have always played a strong role in my art, including my first albums.

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.

I have been and continue to be committed to art as a tool to ignite, comfort, and discomfort.

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.

I am more likely to get paid for my art if it's presented alongside a white artist, so the questions around value and agency arise: What choices should I make, or do I have to make, if I want to be compensated for my work? Why isn't my art valued on its own?

I feel like I have had to catch up to the art I've made, and learn from the protagonists I have written, especially in relation to gender.