In the past, I travelled with 'The Hero and the Crown' by Robin McKinley: I suffer from a fear of flying, and I felt a bit safer knowing I carried the book and characters with me.

When I was a teenager, I was the only black girl at a small, private Episcopal school, where my tuition was paid by the family my mother worked for. It was hard being the only one, and I faced a fair amount of racist and classist bullying there.

One of the most important things that I want for my kids is I want them to live. You know, I want them to live to see 21 and beyond.

As an artist, I feel a certain responsibility to write about difficult subject matter.

As a reader, sometimes, I just want to not think. You know, I want to read something that is purely enjoyable: that is, like, escapist.

I don't really base any of my characters on specific people that I know, although my characters are informed by the kind of people who live in my community.

With all the main characters that I write, it's always very important to me that they have good and bad aspects of their personality. It's important to me that they're complicated and that they're human.

Faulkner's characters, too, were uneducated. They were deprived, but they were allowed to have very rich inner lives. I want to advocate for that, for inner lives that are much more complicated and more poetic than we think.

The ugly heart of the South still beats with this idea that one group of people is worth less.

One of the ways my first novel failed was that I was too in love with my characters.