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I had a very peripatetic childhood, so I bounced around. Lived in Ethiopia until I was, like, three or four and then lived between Ireland and London.

In high school, I began to dig my way into Ethiopian history, and began to understand myself as a young man formed by multiple narratives.

I went to start the first Ethiopian-led project in paleoanthropology, ever. Doing that was not easy.

I don't have memories of Ethiopia as a child. I didn't learn about Ethiopian culture until after I moved to New York and started meeting people from the Ethiopian community.

I started writing as a child. But I didn't think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something - no, maybe junior - and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

All I knew about Ethiopia was from a few records that I like, as well as what I read about the famine. But you get there and it's another world. It's filled with art and music and poetry and intellectuals and writers - all kinds of people.

I didn't start writing my own books until I was 40.

I began writing seriously in my mid-20s and didn't publish my first book until I was 41.

My parents never referenced Ethiopia that much, largely because of the circumstances under which we left. We left during a time of political upheaval, and there was a lot of loss that came with that, so my parents were reluctant to talk about those things. So I had, by and large, an American childhood.