“you ask me to be patient. i paint an old bookshelf

& remember my posture, the way blossoms become

one last thing.”

“There is often a bleakness that permeates Hebrew fiction, and certainly a much darker sense of humor, a lot of sarcasm and irony, as well as self-deprecation. These are less prevalent in most English writing…”

"I changed the channels. The news was on over and over. They were talking about that goddamned arsonist again. Someone had been setting crack houses on fire over in the black part of town. They had set another one just now. This made eight."

"If I were to even write it today, it would be a very different book. It might be better in some ways, but it would be probably less emotionally true to how I was feeling."

“[The Daniels] work is vital because they each add a necessary extension to what it means to be human. And when grouped together, The Daniels offer a clear retort to that well-intentioned if ill-informed statement: ‘A lot of people of color don’t know their family history.’ Ultimately, people of color do know their families, especially if we continue to find and share the writers who make us come alive.”

“Writing really resists optimization and that’s partly why I love it. It makes me reevaluate how I conceive of ‘time well spent.’”