Writer’s Statement

When I was a little girl growing up in Virginia, I had the acute sense that people were lying to me. I didn’t know the term “white supremacy,” but I could feel it all around. Writers struck me as people who told the truth, which is what I wanted to do. The writers I grew up to admire most—James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Lucille Clifton—always told the truth, even when they were making things up.

Everything I write—poems, essays, a book of creative nonfiction, and now a play—seeks to unmask cultural lies, to look beneath what people are blithely saying and focus instead on what they actually mean and what that can tell us about our world. I’ve written about guns, motherhood, a man trying to pick me up in a grocery store parking lot, girls finding their voices.

Most everything I write is set in the American South, a haunted and deeply contested landscape. Often I use humor because laughing is like breathing. It’s how the audience relaxes and becomes present with you. Then you can take them farther inside an ugly truth. I want to go far—as far as possible—then come out on the other side, bringing the audience with me into the wildest kind of hope.