31 Quotes by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

How do we refresh our language? Why do we still use, like, a 150-year-old classification system to talk about people? It's so weird! We still call people black and white?

All of my work is sort of fed by a question, a need to understand the world and why the world is what it is.

'An Octoroon' was written over about three years but premiered in 2014. I'm writing about America's relationship to its own history. Race or not, it's a story about suppression and oppression and many populations being devalued systematically.

I seem to belong to a boom moment of playwrights, and I'm always curious about how we all got here and what comes next.

I go through phases of watching a ton of dance/performance, and I am bizarrely well-informed on the subject.

I identify as queer. I just don't know what any of these labels mean.

I spent summers with my mother's parents in Arkansas, where religion felt very present. My grandmother was Baptist, and my grandfather was Methodist. Double Southern whammy.

I have this thing called hereditary neuropathy with liability to pressure palsies. It's incredibly rare.

I was 23 when I wrote 'Neighbors,' and I definitely look back at it now and cringe a little bit. I was trying to understand what drama was.