As African-Americans, that's what's being played fast and loose with, our citizenship. When you have the Trayvon Martins and the Michael Browns being shot and killed, it's because, on a certain level, there is a kind of mutability in the understanding of citizenship around the black body.

The book, 'Citizen,' begins with daily encounters, little moments, places where language reveals how racism determines how we interact.

When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows.

I think sports is one of the places where race plays itself out publicly. Although we pretend it doesn't.

Theater is still a medium which attracts young writers. You'd think that it would be all over by now, with television and film. But it's not.

Music. It's all creativity right here, right now.

With film music, endings are often more difficult than beginnings, because a beginning is an underline, a way of exciting a moment, and then you have to find a way to dissipate that.

I think I would have been a writer, anyhow, in the sense of having written a story every now and then, or continued writing poetry. But it was the war experience and the two novels I wrote about Vietnam that really got me started as a professional writer.