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I don't think there's enough breadth to the stories told about African-Americans.

Black history is American history.

It did occur to me that certainly African-Americans are not underserved in picture books, but those books are almost all about specifically black experiences.

All black Americans have slave names. They have white names; names that the slave master has given to them.

There haven't been enough profound things written about what being black means and what a black character is. Nobody knows.

I didn't have that many black people in my life, so I had to sort of search them out. And I didn't grow up in America, but I identified as much with their writing about the black experience as I did with their writing about the human experience.

I believe that the American audience is not so dumb that they wouldn't be interested in a black story.

In my time since moving to the United States, I've found that there is a dearth of great writing for black people. There are stories that depict us in a way that isn't cliched or niche, and that a white person, a Chinese person, an Indian person can watch and relate to. Those are the stories I want to be a part of telling.

I studied African American studies, and I read these slave narratives and the escape narratives of people that were able to escape slavery and always found those stories intriguing and powerful and inspiring.

Offhand, the only North American writers I can think of who have come from a background of rural poverty and gone on to write about it have been Negroes.