For BuzzFeed Reader, Tamerra Griffin speaks with Claudia Rankine—author of Citizen and recipient of one of this year’s MacArthur Genius fellowships—about police violence, forms of protest, and how she would have woven these topics into her acclaimed book had she been writing it this year:

I would have added images around many of these protests that have happened. I might have talked to people, and I mean all people—Arabs, blacks, whites, young, old—about what it means to create these interventions into our traumatized existence. It’s interesting that these things are being labeled as violence when really it’s the violence that’s calling for the intervention.