My family and I survived Hurricane Katrina in 2005; we left my grandmother's flooding house, were refused shelter by a white family, and took refuge in trucks in an open field during a Category Five hurricane. I saw an entire town demolished, people fighting over water, breaking open caskets searching for something that could help them survive.

There is power in naming racism for what it is, in shining a bright light on it, brighter than any torch or flashlight. A thing as simple as naming it allows us to root it out of the darkness and hushed conversation where it likes to breed like roaches. It makes us acknowledge it. Confront it.

Before Hurricane Katrina, I always felt like I could come back home. And home was a real place, and also it had this mythical weight for me. Because of the way that Hurricane Katrina ripped everything away, it cast that idea in doubt.

While I've said that there are plenty of things I dislike about the South, I can be clear that there are things I love about the South.

I celebrate my blackness. I love the artistic vibrancy of the culture I was born to.

I try to treat writing as part of my daily routine: I write for at least two hours, five days per week. I tend to write at home, in a room I've set aside for the task. I don't work well in cafes or busy, loud spaces, although I wish I could. It would mean greater flexibility for me.

When I look back on my reading habits when I was really young, I was really drawn to stories about strong girls who in some ways are outsiders.

In the South, there is more overt racism. It's more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it's not as if by moving I'm going to be able to escape institutionalized racism. It's not as though my life won't be twisted and impacted by racism anymore. It will.

There was something so empowering about having President Obama in office because I know that for many of us, that's something that we never thought that we'd see in our lifetime.

People give the South a bad rap. It's often stereotyped as backwards and close-minded and dogmatic, and all of those things have been true. But I think that the South is changing, slowly but surely.

I don't really base any of my characters on specific people that I know, although my characters are informed by the kind of people who live in my community.

When I was a teenager, I was the only black girl at a small, private Episcopal school, where my tuition was paid by the family my mother worked for. It was hard being the only one, and I faced a fair amount of racist and classist bullying there.

I've heard some writers say that they are obsessed with certain ideas and that they find themselves writing around the same obsession again and again, but telling different stories to get at that same idea. I'm beginning to think that I suffer from this syndrome, too.

I would encounter W. E. B. Du Bois and the term double consciousness. When I read it, I thought about sitting in my mother's employer's family room, watching my mother clean while I waited for her to finish so we could go home.

I'm always thinking about time. That's one of themes I return to in my work, the way the past bears on the present, the way that time is not linear, and how that expresses itself in people's everyday lives.

I read everything. When I say everything, I read everything: children's literature, Y.A., science fiction, fantasy, romance - I read it all. Each genre fulfills a different need I have. Each book teaches me something.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

'The UnAmericans' is a compassionate and brilliantly rendered debut - and for a book set largely in the past, these stories feel essential to understanding the contemporary world in which we live.

'As I Lay Dying,' I reread that often. That's the first work of Faulkner's that I read that so amazed me and that I responded to emotionally and viscerally. I admired it so much, and I think that's why I keep rereading it.

People are not afraid to be activists, to be vocal. And I think back to my years in college, and that wasn't the case.

My mom worked as a housekeeper, and I saw her relationship with her employers - how on the one hand she spent more time with these women than with a lot of her friends, and how in certain ways they were friends. But then they weren't.

That larger story in 'Salvage the Bones' is just about survival, and I think that, in the end, there are things about this novel and about these characters' experiences that make their stories universal stories.

Sometimes, you get tired of fighting. I think you just sort of come to this realization that yes, that you will get tired, but that doesn't mean that you can give up the fight.

Katrina silenced me for two years. I wrote a 12-page essay on my experience in Katrina, and that's it. I didn't write anything for, like, two, two and a half years after Katrina hit because it was so traumatic.

I need the lightness of children's lit.

Throughout my career, when I have been rejected, there was sometimes subtext, and it was this: People will not read your work because these are not universal stories.

A lot of times, real life is more surreal than writing.

It infuriates me that the work of white American writers can be universal and lay claim to classic texts, while black and female authors are ghetto-ized as 'other.'

I could stifle my voice, or strip it. I know that I could, because we can do anything we put our minds to. I know that I could, but it feels very unnatural for me to strip my prose like that, in part because place is so important to me.

I always think about Faulkner, and I would argue that there can be a difference between the way that characters express themselves internally and externally.

Young people have a right to optimism, and rightly so; human beings have grown and developed and accomplished wonderful feats in the world. But what mires me in pessimism is the fact that so much of life is pain and sorrow and willful ignorance and violence, and pushing back against that tide takes so much effort, so much steady fight. It's tiring.

I worked with several writers at the University of Michigan: Nicholas Delbanco, Peter Ho Davies, Eileen Pollack, Laura Kasischke, and Thomas Lynch, who told me the same thing over and over again: Persist. Read, write, and improve: tell your stories.

Writing 'Men We Reaped' broke me in different ways at different spots in the drafting process. The first draft was hard because I was just getting it out. In some ways, that draft failed. I was really just telling the story, not making assessments - this happened, then this. Just putting those facts down on paper was really painful.

Faulkner is a really important figure in southern literature. I wrestle with him and his legacy every time I sit down and write a piece of fiction.

In the past, I travelled with 'The Hero and the Crown' by Robin McKinley: I suffer from a fear of flying, and I felt a bit safer knowing I carried the book and characters with me.

As an artist, I feel a certain responsibility to write about difficult subject matter.

There are moments from childhood that attract heat in our memories, some for their sublime brilliance, some for their malignancy. The first time that I was treated differently because of my race is one such memory.

Without the library, I would have been lost.

When I was writing my first novel, 'Where the Line Bleeds,' which had young black men as its main characters, I was very invested in telling the story and also very worried about the effects the story would have.

On one hand, I can say, you know, I had many family members - I had many people in my extended family who left right after Katrina, who relocated to different cities, right? Houston, Atlanta. Right? Most of them have come back.

It's impossible for most black Americans to construct full family trees. Official census records, used by so many genealogy enthusiasts to piece together their families' pasts, don't include our non-European ancestors.

One of the ways my first novel failed was that I was too in love with my characters.

By the time I wrote my memoir, 'Men We Reaped,' I had been running from writing it for a long time. When the events in the book were happening, I knew I'd probably write about them one day. I didn't want to. I'd studied fiction, and I was committed to establishing myself as a fiction writer first.

People ask me all the time, 'Why did I move home?' As well as I can articulate it, that's why. I moved home because I love the community that I come from.

I think, when I write, one of the things that I'm really attempting to do is I'm attempting to humanize my characters.

I couldn't run from that desire to tell stories, that desire to tell stories about us, and about the people I loved.

Biblical myth is as integral to the spirit of the South as the heat and humidity.

I didn't start really focusing on writing until I was 24.

The ugly heart of the South still beats with this idea that one group of people is worth less.

I feel like in the reading I did when I was growing up, and also in the way that people talk and tell stories here in the South, they use a lot of figurative language. The stories that I heard when I was growing up, and the stories that I read, taught me to use the kind of language that I do. It's hard for me to work against that when I am writing.