I’ve been blessed to know a lot of artists who are also mothers, who don’t necessarily go the cliché route of “motherhood ruins you.” It has always b… - Kaitlyn Greenidge

The work of a fiction writer is to take narrow experiences and explore the emotional vastness that’s within them.

The contemporary fiction I read is mostly by Black, queer, and Black and queer writers. There are some extraordinary people working right now and there are scenes in literary fiction being published that I know wouldn’t have been published five years ago. But they probably would have 45 years ago. Tommy Orange, Torrey Peters, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Maisy Card are all extraordinary. Art is cyclical – it’s less about getting better, and more about looking for those books and pieces that have always done what I described above – inviting people into a conversation, always going deeper. They’re out there. They just aren’t necessarily a part of “the canon” and definitely aren’t regularly taught to others. Simone Schwarz-Bart’s The Bridge of Beyond; Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven; Carlene Hatcher Polite’s The Flagellants are all books like this.

Nonfiction and fiction are both about asking questions and hopefully inviting a reader into an ongoing conversation.