I think all serious artists at some point waver in their self-belief. But you also have to have those moments when you are deluded enough to believe … - Danzy Senna

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

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.

Late in “Colored Television,” Jane returns to a passage by a (white) scholar whose study of mulattos influenced her doomed manuscript. “My life’s work has been to try to define a people that cannot be defined or even located — for the mulatto is the only race in our nation’s history that is perpetually shifting, changing colors, morphing into something unrecognizable,” the scholar writes.