...To grapple with race is not at odds or separate from the craft of writing fiction. - Danzy Senna

I was making fun of the fact that the people with the least financial reward – the smallest piece of the pie – fight the most viciously amongst themselves. In other words, poets. There is no practical or market value to what poets do. It’s probably the purest form of writing in the artistic sense, but perhaps because of this, it’s the most ego-driven. Don’t get me wrong, I love poets, but there is a level of snark in that world that puts to shame any other genre. Novelists are second – almost as bad as poets about one another. I’ve never seen anyone get so much deep pleasure as a novelist reading a terrible review of another more successful novelist. Television is unlike poetry or fiction in that it’s a collaborative art. And because of this, amongst TV people there’s less viciousness on the surface. At least Jane [the protagonist of her novel Colored Television - Wikiquote] thinks so. But just beneath that smiling surface, there’s something maybe more dangerous.

For both of my parents, it was very clear to them we were going to identify as Black — in a city as racist as Boston, in a country as racist as America, that the identity in us that needed protecting and shoring up was our Black identity. It wasn’t the white side of us.

I think it’s always true for every writer that your debut novel stands on its own, but your second novel is always seen in relation to what came before.