African Americans

"When we're born, our experience is half the time spent undoing these ideas that were placed onto our body since birth and then building a personal identity on top of that."

"I’m existing on all of these different planes: in one moment I’m here, then I’m in the future, then I’m on a slave ship…"

"I just feel left out of the whole possibility of love and romance. I hate that that is related to my race, and I hate that I believe it. I hate that I have felt it for so long, and I hate that white women have it so easy. And it’s not that they are all beautiful or interesting—their face could look like a piece of paper, but there is a cultural perspective skewed towards them. We are asked to compare ourselves to them."

"When I started writing, it was a way to understand my own adolescence, and what came out was a revelation about my own teenage years..."

"Nonfiction is supposed to drive home a point. In fiction, you need more nuance, buried in layers. There is character development and plot, and that switch can be tricky. I really like writing short stories, and I wish they were more popular..."

"One is that I’m the first reader, and so I’m always writing these poems to myself, and my self — my self as a reader — is someone who wants to be transformed in the process of reading poems. I don’t want to read a poem that I already know."

"Nonreaders. Especially Nonreaders of Color. Which I didn’t even realize until so many of them started contacting me. I write for them because I think it’s important to read, and yet I also understand that when you’ve never really seen yourself if the type of stuff you’re assigned, reading seems kinda wack [sic]. So I wanna hook the reluctants and get them started reading for enjoyment.…"

"I was definitely feeling alienated in various ways, and feeling some unarticulated rage and sorrow about a number of things. Once I got introduced to the right poems, I became aware of maybe a way to express those things, articulate them."

"I feel like over the years, I’ve become more invested in a kind of written spoken voice. And connected to that, that I’m interested in the audience in a different way than I was before. I’m interested in caring for my audience. I don’t mean taking care of them. I mean being understanding. I understand that someone reading something that I’ve written is a generosity."

"I have inherited this sense that seriousness does not necessarily go with grief, or seriousness does not necessarily go with joy, which to me is not glee, actually. Joy is this very complex, full, rigorous emotion. But yeah, I think the fact that I felt like I was being a little transgressive by titling it that indicates at least something about the way that I’ve come up in contemporary poetry."

"The dialogue. I love writing dialogue and using that particular element of narrative to draw out the heart of a story because storytelling as a discipline really began with speech—stories orally passed down, generation to generation. Dialogue is just my most favorite thing. In all the stuff I’ve written actually."

"I love so many different writers from different eras. But a few—of, really, zillions, so this is an incomplete list—would be Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Ralph Ellison, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, Percival Everett, Philip Roth and Junot Díaz on the novel side and, lord, the poets—too many to even mention. But right now I’m re-reading and re-reading Robert Hayden’s poems, which are absolutely beautiful and brilliant...I think Amiri Baraka’s work made me want to write poems too. Especially his beautiful poem, “An Agony. As Now.” A really, really beautiful poem."

"Some writers want to write something that doesn’t exist within a time, but I’m not interested in that. I want to capture particular moments in time…I’ve always seen my writing as an attempt to document and be specific in that documentation."

"To me, that always echoes in questions of race, and how I think so much of what we end up calling racism—and it may very well be racism proper—but I am interested in how racism is also just the mindset of ‘I don’t want to be associated with the reviled, with the alien class, I want to keep as much distance as possible from the people who are oppressed.’ And so these questions were on my mind the whole time, and as you say it’s kind of an unfortunate coincidence that they’ve come to a head now, and in the way that they are coming to a head, but it wasn’t intentional."

"I often start with a question as big and unwieldy as why do we have children – or what are we investing in when we love and raise our children; it’s a process of looking for structures – images or rhetorical figures – that will contain my questions."

"I don’t think it’s a responsibility, but I certainly think it’s something poetry can do, and I think that poetry has a unique ability to do it because of its self-referential nature and its self-conscious nature. And I mean that in the sense that, in prose, we’re not often as conscious of the language and the operation of language itself. Our focus in on the content, on what is denotatively produced. In poetry we are trained, or at least readers of poetry are trained, to attend to or account for the structures of language as well as what that language conveys."

"I’m interested in coaching, modeling, and teaching various writing practices and less in discovering talent. I want students to develop their own unique writing practices rather than impose my aesthetic values from the top down…"

"And I think for any kid, you know, looking up to - any boy, certainly, looking up to his father - and, you know, I'm granting that there are some aspects of masculinity that I'm not entirely down with anymore, you know, as an adult, but as a kid, I bought into the narratives of masculinity very much.…"

"I think what writing should be at its essence is a creative expression, it should be informed by the needs of the story, by the dictates of your characters…I feel like I can write any character I want—an African, a European, a writer can do anything, it just has to feel true to the story."

"What is profound about fiction is that it creates a place where we can imagine the possible futures of these kinds of movements. Those are the kinds of questions we have to ask as writers."

"The thing that is exciting about any project or any book is that you have to push yourself, you have to push beyond what makes you comfortable."

"There is no war that does not impact the lives of children, so children and what happens to them in migration or conflict are important to me, and we generally don’t hear enough about it. And it’s difficult because they don’t know yet how to express their perspectives very well, so I’m interested in that, how their vocabulary doesn’t yet capture what they are seeing and feeling. As a writer, that becomes an interesting vehicle through which to tell a story."

"Fiction gives me the right to do it. It's not an autobiography. I did have the right to tell this story. My position is that you write from the place that you are, and it's not a detriment, and it's not something that undermines any kind of authenticity. I had to understand very early on that I'm writing this book as an American, with very, very strong ties to Ethiopia—and a deep love, my family is there—but ultimately, I am writing it with an American way of looking at things. That doesn't mean that the story is not authentic. Or then you have to question what "authentic" means…"

"Recently the things that I’ve enjoyed reading are writers from Africa, like Maaza Mengiste, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor. These are people who are doing brilliantly well I think, and in both of those cases, they’ve just published their second novels. So very early in their writing careers."

"I just haven't experienced a lot of the ridiculousness, you know? I haven't been around that long…I’m constantly shocked. Whenever I'm doing work, a large part of that work is going to be reacting, and I don't think that's a bad thing necessarily — me being surprised but still wanting to change things."

"I think fiction gives us a door into what is actually happening around us. There are those who don’t trust fiction, they will read history or biography, but they don’t understand that those forms of narrative are also constructed."

"Some of my favorite writers are those who break form. I wanted to see if I could do that under their tutelage. I’m really proud of being able to combine the stories of the Ethiopians and the Italians, to force questions about both of them, about loyalty, about racism, about being subjugated by the very people who should be protecting you. These were the questions I wanted to bring forward."

"I write fiction that revolves around archival research and historical events. What I search for in documented history: what happened, is not necessarily what I seek when I write it down: what was it like, and what was left out. I go back to something Breyten Breytenbach once told me, that fiction tells a truth that history cannot. I lean into fictive truths."

"Part of my concern in this book was to center the story on people who are often not written about in history—the farmers, the peasants, the servants who don’t have the social standing to make them newsworthy—because the stories that get remembered are so often about people who are already famous or noteworthy."

"What is war? You send soldiers out and, although nobody wants to say it, you know a certain number will be killed, and you hope there will be fewer than the casualties on the other side. War is dealing with human beings as objects. (2017)"

"It was not until a revolution tore my country apart that I began to understand how war could render decent people unrecognisable. Only when I had felt real terror did I begin to comprehend the many ways that conflict can devour us without spilling a drop of blood. (2020)"

"part of what I’ve realized with this [second] book is that creativity is always about running against and into yourself. In every way. (2017)"

"I try to give folks the tools and resources to be a part of a movement…I'm a very strong believer in the idea that everybody has a place in the movement."

"It’s really challenging that idea of who is a hero, who has made contributions to society, but then also not historicizing it, so we’re really putting it in the present because that’s what modern media is so much about…"

"She is afraid of crumbling and disappearing, of being taken and being left behind at the same time: a body tumbling between hands while dying inside."

"What is lost is gone, my child, what is lost makes room for something else."

"He is doing as she once did, in the naïve belief that what is buried stays that way, that what is hidden will stay unseen, that what is yours will remain always in your possession. He is being foolish."

"These aren't the days to pretend you're only a wife or a sister or a mother, she says. We're more than this."

"Make living your act of defiance. Record it all."

"Who remembers what to do? she asks. Who remembers what it means to be more than what this world believes of us?"

"My father was always a stranger to me, he will say. I knew him through his questions, not his answers."

"She is mid-sentence, her tongue against her teeth, curving around a word lost forever."

"She does not want to remember but she is here and memory is gathering bones."

"Here is the truth he wants to ignore: that what is forged into memory tucks itself into bone and muscle. It will always be there and it will follow us to the grave."

"It really was harmful because it makes it feel for women, for LGBTQ folks, for even white men too, that there are only these tokens and that’s not the case. What it does is reinforce white supremacy, it reinforces patriarchy. It’s harmful to everyone, not just the people who are being erased."

"in many ways, Ethiopia is an oral culture., I spent a lot of time listening to stories and histories told around dinner tables or in the sitting room. The stories my grandfather would tell were often about the Italo-Ethiopian wars, both the first and the second, and also life lessons. Those stories of my grandfather's really informed how I viewed-history, how I viewed Ethiopia; what it meant to be Ethiopian. Those were my books, the stories that I learned. When I think back to the stories that I would hear, especially when my parents would tell stories, that cadence in which they told them, and the momentum they had while telling it, that's something I am always trying to emulate in my writing. So I count them as an influence as much as anything that I've read."

"We all know that war destroys mankind, and in spite of their differences in race, creed, and religion, women all across the world despise war because its fruit is nothing but destruction."

"What he knows is this: there is no past, there is no "what happened", there is only the moment that unfolds into the next, dragging everything with it, constantly renewing. Everything is happening at once."

"The routine dulls the terror."

"Being gay isn't a choice, just like being black isn't a choice…I don't stop. I do not give up. I do not take America's 'no' to my identity for an answer."