Everything I write, I read aloud. It has to sound a certain way and look a certain way on page.
The strength of my mother is something I didn't pay attention to for so long. Here she was, this single mom, who was part of the Great Migration, who was part of a Jim Crow south, who said, 'I'm getting my kids out of here. I'm creating opportunities for these young people by any means necessary.'
For my family, 'black-ish' is the reward on a Thursday evening - a day after the show officially airs, when it's finally available to be streamed.
I feel like, as a person of color, I've always been kind of doing the work against the tide.
I never know, when I start writing a story, what's going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out.
To me, elegy suggests that there is hope, and in some respects you've moved past the loss and are able to deal with it and to write about it.
I love writing for young people. It's the literature that was most important to me, the stories that shaped me and informed my own journey as a writer.
In the family, writing wasn't anything anyone understood - being a writer in the real world? How could it be? We didn't have those mirrors.
I've wanted to be a writer since I was seven, but I didn't grow up in family where people aspired to live as writers.
I read a lot of the books that I love again and again and again and try to understand how the writer did it.
Being a Witness was too closed an experience. That's what I walked away from, not the things I believe.
