I feel like in the reading I did when I was growing up, and also in the way that people talk and tell stories here in the South, they use a lot of figurative language. The stories that I heard when I was growing up, and the stories that I read, taught me to use the kind of language that I do. It's hard for me to work against that when I am writing.

One of the things that is so striking to me about the South, especially living here now as an adult, is that I see a lot more mixed-race couples than I saw when I was growing up in the 1980s and the 1990s. I feel like living across the color lines has become something that's more expected.

The UnAmericans' is a compassionate and brilliantly rendered debut - and for a book set largely in the past, these stories feel essential to understanding the contemporary world in which we live.

I'm always thinking about time. That's one of themes I return to in my work, the way the past bears on the present, the way that time is not linear, and how that expresses itself in people's everyday lives.

I'm from Florida, and my family somehow is really into country music. We're all southern in a way: My grandpa hunts, my uncle's, like, a redneck, and we're all NASCAR fans.

The thing I'm most proud of is my family, the way they've turned out.

No parents deserve to see their only child die.

At the beginning of my career, it was really difficult for my family to understand what I was working on, but they supported me anyway and gave me the best advice, which was to always be myself.