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My plays aren't stylistically the same. Just being an African-American woman playwright on Broadway is experimental.

I don't think that everything on Broadway relates to us, and I think that's why we as black people don't always go to Broadway shows, but shows like 'What's on the Hearts of Men' has a lot of issues that can relate to black families, and that's why I enjoy it.

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

At one time if you were a black writer you had to be one of the best writers in the world to be published. You had to be great. Now you can be good. Mediocre. And that's good.

My writing has been largely concerned with the depicting of Negro life in America.

Broadway, in my opinion, is a microcosm of America. Those challenges that we have in our country, I think we still have those challenges on the Broadway stage. I think there are far too few African-American directors working on Broadway.

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 always crave to see more stories about and by people of color, particularly new work by young black writers.

Somehow, I realized I could write books about black characters who reflected my own experiences or otherworldly experiences - not just stories of history, poverty and oppression.

I believe black characters in fiction are still revolutionary, given our long history of erasure.