Interviews

My artistic practice includes making films, writing, and visual art. It’s driven by the same kinds of concerns around race, identity, and self-expression—and what it means to speak or to say something. In an interview [about] Dorothy, a publishing project,…

“She saw the readers as a chorus, like the chorus in a Greek play, where the audience is part of the ensemble. She gives the example of when you’re in an audience in a musical performance—you’re shouting, clapping, and stomping…

“It is a writerly habit to notice all the small and large things that comprise characters or potential characters. By the time they reach the page, I may not even recall the source of a snippet of dialogue or a…

“[P]oetry is not doing what it does in isolation. I don’t expect my poems to magically accomplish anything. I see my poems as part of a movement: That movement is political. It is artistic. It transcends poetry. It transcends politics.…

I like stories because you can take a big swing, you can do anything you can;, you can be experimental. If it doesn’t work out, it really doesn’t matter. When you work in the long form, if you take a…

“I was always, across these various modes of expression, chasing or trying to harness this underlying current of poetry—that thing in paintings or buildings or concertos or in (some) really good prose that makes me, even if temporarily, wholeheartedly invested…

“It’s not a book in which plot is the central driver. What I was most interested in is how falling in love spurs James into increasing levels of hope or longing, or agony in some cases. It was a very…

I wanted to write something inspired by the witchcraft folklore I learned about from my family growing up back in Mexico. But I also lived in Massachusetts for a little while and wanted something related to that locale, which is…

“Many of us go through similar experiences, where the foundations of our lives and family dynamics collapse. These situations force us to come face to face with the instability of self-narratives, family structures, and personal identities. I’m enormously curious about…

“One of the reasons that I’ve allowed my book to exist in so many genre containers is because I’ve often felt like my own life is simultaneously a coming-of-age story, along with a surreal fabulist story, along with a medical…

“I was setting flame to not so much the particulars of life, but just the appearance of it and the rules that I was supposed to live by. Staying quiet about what happened to coming out of that lane to…