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I think that black fiction authors have to work very hard to avoid being typed as seeking only a black audience.

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.'

Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wildlife, poverty, maybe AIDS. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations.

White writers in many cases choose not to populate their fiction with people of color. A lot of what I'm doing is trying to write against that, not about race but against the avoidance of race that's such a dominant model in white literary discourse.

We don't want to create a literary ghetto in which black writers are only allowed to write black characters and women writers are put on 'girl books.'

Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.

I love writing for other actors, women of African descent and people who are generally underrepresented.

I write for myself, and my goal is bringing that world and that experience of black Americans to life on the stage and giving it a space there.

I love writing about black women, but if you go beyond that, we're human beings - and because we're human beings, it's universal for everybody.