Reading equals hope times change.

The civil rights movement was about access to public space. We had to fight for public space.

My writing is inspired by where I come from, where I am today, and where I hope to go some day.

What I write comes from a place of deep love, and a deep understanding of all kinds of otherness.

I love playing with form. I love playing with sounds... I love music, and I love writing that has a musicality to it.

The epistolary form is one of the hardest to write. It's so hard to show something that's bigger in a letter. Plus, you have to have the balance of how many letters are going to work to tell the story and how few are going to make it fall apart.

'Brown Girl Dreaming' was a book I had a lot of doubts about - mainly, would this story be meaningful to anyone besides me? My editor, Nancy Paulsen, kept assuring me, but there were moments when I was in a really sad place with the story for so many reasons. It wasn't an easy book to write - emotionally, physically, or creatively.

As a child in South Carolina, I spent summers like so many children - sitting on my grandparents' back porch with my siblings, spitting watermelon seeds into the garden or, even worse, swallowing them and trembling as my older brother and sister spoke of the vine that was probably already growing in my belly.

Each book I write is a shout into the silence and a prayer and a plea for change.

In young adult novels and children's books, you stay in moment. The story goes through a school year or a weekend. You never get a sense of a future self because the young person has not lived that yet.

I love how much love there is in the world of young adult and children's literature.

Greenville, S.C., in the 1970s is a rolling green dream in my memory now.

The South was very segregated. I mean, all through my childhood, long after Jim Crow was supposed to not be in existence, it was still a very segregated South.

I'm usually working on several things at once. If I get bored with one, I can go on to another. That way, I never get stuck.

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 couldn't be a writer without hope. I think I became a writer because I'm pretty optimistic.

I'm usually working either on a picture book and a young adult book, or a middle grade book and a young adult book. When I get bored with one, I move to the other, and then I go back.

You can't have too many books featuring people of color, just like you can't have too many books featuring white people.

Until I was about 13, Manhattan had been a world seen from its edges.

My mother was a single mom whose days were spent as a customer service rep at Con Edison in downtown Brooklyn.

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.

By the time I was in fifth grade, I was dreaming of the Pulitzer Prize.

I would have written 'Brown Girl Dreaming' if no one had ever wanted to buy it, if it went nowhere but inside a desk drawer that my own children pulled out one day to find a tool for survival, a symbol of how strong we are and how much we've come through.

In all my childhood, I never heard my grandparents say that anything shocked or surprised them. They knew what their country was capable of.

When I was a child, we never began a meal without prayer. We thanked God for the food, for each other.

My kids speak of both subtle slights and blatant racism. It's a narrative I never imagined for them.

Who are you without your girls? I truly believe that. Who are you without the people who help you make sense of the misogyny, the racism, the economic struggle, all of it? You need those people saying you're a good mom, a great writer. You're a great dresser. You cook well. Whatever the beauty is that you need to hear.

A 10-year-old knows a lot. If you think she or he isn't noticing the world around them, you're missing a lot.

I write for whoever needs to read it.

Hope is universal.

Told a lot of stories as a child. Not 'Once upon a time' stories but, basically, outright lies. I loved lying and getting away with it!

There was something about telling the lie-story and seeing your friends' eyes grow wide with wonder. Of course I got in trouble for lying, but I didn't stop until fifth grade.

I am still surprised when I walk into a bookstore and see my name on a book's binder.

Sometimes, when I'm sitting at my desk for long hours and nothing's coming to me, I remember my fifth-grade teacher, the way her eyes lit up when she said, 'This is really good.'

I love the physical act of writing as well as how I grow which each situation I put on the page.

The hardest part is telling one's story. Once the story is on the page, the rest will come.

I feel like I am walking in some amazing footsteps of writers who have come before me, like S.E. Hinton, Walter Dean Myers, Christopher Paul Curtis, Richard Peck and Kate DiCamillo, who I love.

I deeply believe in many Christian values: love people; do the right thing; know that there's good in everyone, that God's looking out for all of us.

Being a Witness was too closed an experience. That's what I walked away from, not the things I believe.

When I write, I don't think about messages for my readers.

What I learned for myself... is that no matter what the circumstances, people survive.

I wrote all the time, and I had teachers who encouraged it.

If someone has something they're really passionate about, that's their brilliance, and my big question is how do we grow that passion/brilliance and/or help them grow.

In writing 'Another Brooklyn,' I had to imagine what happens when friendships dissolve.

'Another Brooklyn' came to me in this kind of dreamlike series of vignettes.

I don't want anyone to walk through the world feeling invisible ever again.

Labeling is not the best way to get young people to deeply engage in reading.

Childhood, young adulthood is fluid. And it's very easy to get labeled very young and have to carry something through your childhood and into your adulthood that is not necessarily who you are.

With my writing, I try to do stuff I have not done before. Each time I sit down, I want to have a new experience, and by extension, I want my readers to have a different experience.