In all my childhood, I never heard my grandparents say that anything shocked or surprised them. They knew what their country was capable of.

When I was a child, we never began a meal without prayer. We thanked God for the food, for each other.

My kids speak of both subtle slights and blatant racism. It's a narrative I never imagined for them.

Who are you without your girls? I truly believe that. Who are you without the people who help you make sense of the misogyny, the racism, the economic struggle, all of it? You need those people saying you're a good mom, a great writer. You're a great dresser. You cook well. Whatever the beauty is that you need to hear.

A 10-year-old knows a lot. If you think she or he isn't noticing the world around them, you're missing a lot.

I write for whoever needs to read it.

Hope is universal.

Told a lot of stories as a child. Not 'Once upon a time' stories but, basically, outright lies. I loved lying and getting away with it!

There was something about telling the lie-story and seeing your friends' eyes grow wide with wonder. Of course I got in trouble for lying, but I didn't stop until fifth grade.

I am still surprised when I walk into a bookstore and see my name on a book's binder.

Sometimes, when I'm sitting at my desk for long hours and nothing's coming to me, I remember my fifth-grade teacher, the way her eyes lit up when she said, 'This is really good.'

I love the physical act of writing as well as how I grow which each situation I put on the page.

The hardest part is telling one's story. Once the story is on the page, the rest will come.

I feel like I am walking in some amazing footsteps of writers who have come before me, like S.E. Hinton, Walter Dean Myers, Christopher Paul Curtis, Richard Peck and Kate DiCamillo, who I love.

I deeply believe in many Christian values: love people; do the right thing; know that there's good in everyone, that God's looking out for all of us.

Being a Witness was too closed an experience. That's what I walked away from, not the things I believe.

When I write, I don't think about messages for my readers.

What I learned for myself... is that no matter what the circumstances, people survive.

I wrote all the time, and I had teachers who encouraged it.

If someone has something they're really passionate about, that's their brilliance, and my big question is how do we grow that passion/brilliance and/or help them grow.

In writing 'Another Brooklyn,' I had to imagine what happens when friendships dissolve.

'Another Brooklyn' came to me in this kind of dreamlike series of vignettes.

I don't want anyone to walk through the world feeling invisible ever again.

Labeling is not the best way to get young people to deeply engage in reading.

Childhood, young adulthood is fluid. And it's very easy to get labeled very young and have to carry something through your childhood and into your adulthood that is not necessarily who you are.

With my writing, I try to do stuff I have not done before. Each time I sit down, I want to have a new experience, and by extension, I want my readers to have a different experience.

I think people are willing to talk about anything if you come to it with kindness.

In the family, writing wasn't anything anyone understood - being a writer in the real world? How could it be? We didn't have those mirrors.

When someone says to me, 'I love your book - I read it in a day,' I want to tell them to go back and read it again.

I think there is such a richness to the South and a lushness and a way of life.

I feel like I'm a New Yorker to the bone. But there is a lot of the South in me. I know there is a lot of the South in my mannerisms. There's a lot of the South in my expectations of other people and how people treat each other. There's a lot of the South in the way I speak, but it could never be home.

I don't want my kids to have to walk through a world where they have to constantly explain who they are and who their family is.

Even after Jim Crow was supposed to not be a part of the South anymore, there were still ways in which you couldn't get away from it. And I think once I got to Brooklyn, there was this freedom we had.

My mom was very strict. And we were very religious. So I knew that I was not allowed to do the wrong thing. And I knew that I had a home I could run to. And I had a mom.

To be poet laureate is to try to spread the love and the accessibility of poetry to young people.

I'm fascinated by adult women who don't have close friends and how that could come to be. I think when you're a kid, the relationships are so intimate, and you're so connected to your girls, so what becomes of them? What could possibly happen to have you become an adult woman and no longer have that?

My mom was a big fan of Al Green... James Brown we weren't allowed to listen to, so of course I knew James Brown.

The conscious imprinting that happens between, say, 10 and 16 is huge. I think it's so important for me as a writer to stay open to the memories of that period because they were so formative.

I do believe that books can change lives and give people this kind of language they wouldn't have had otherwise.

I think it's so important that, if I'm writing about the real world, I stay true to it. I think that kids do compartmentalize, and they're hopefully able to see it from a safe place of their own lives and, through that, learn something about empathy.

I think there is much more queer visibility than there was when I was a kid. There is marriage, more trans visibility, and many more celebrities who are open about the sexuality. This was so not the case when I was a kid.

I think, as a kid, turning on the television and seeing that everyone seemed to be wealthy and white made me feel like an outsider, lesser than. I was not wealthy. I was not white.

I think, even though homophobia still exists, there is much more of a dialogue and a taboo around being homophobic.

When I was a kid, I got in trouble for lying a lot, and I had a teacher say, 'Instead of lying, write it down, because if you write it down, it's not a lie anymore; it's fiction.'

I feel like once I say out loud, to the public, what I'm working on, it's never going to be an actual book. So until it's close to done, I keep pretty quiet about my next stuff!

I love writing for young people. It's the literature that was most important to me, the stories that shaped me and informed my own journey as a writer.

I didn't know how many independent bookstores had amazing wine lists until I toured with 'Another Brooklyn.'

I don't believe there are 'struggling' readers, 'advanced' readers, or 'non' readers.

I rewrite a lot until I get the rhythm and story right on the page.

Everything I write, I read aloud. It has to sound a certain way and look a certain way on page.