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"And I would stop and take you in, all of you, and when our eyes lock we'd just stare into each other's souls and all of the lost time would come out in the shape of a big smile, a few tears and a tight hug that feels like...I don't know, it would feel like home."
"It's hard for black women to ask for help. We think we don't need it. We're used to being in pain and living with it."
"I'm not reading any kind of fantasy [for young adults] or Hunger Games or anything like that. It's more just like geeks with crushes. It's very sweet, and I'm enjoying how honest they are, and I'm enjoying the humanity in them."
"I think often if people don't have a lot of experience with a particular type of person or a particular type of brain, they can make dangerous assumptions. That's one of the reasons that I'm so interested in contradicting and troubling held thoughts about black women."
"I wanted [the book 'There are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé?'] to be colorful. I wanted it to be evocative. I wanted a figure of a black woman that the reader has to confront."
"Since the election [of Donald Trump], I've been thinking about a lot of theory. Lots of [Michel] Foucault and [Karl] Marx, thinking about different systems, thinking about power. Trying to figure out what I can take and learn from history as a tool for getting through whatever is happening right now, which feels very significant and major."
"I think there's something that's fascist [in Donald Trump's election], and something that I think we could probably learn from, in terms of the energy in the world right now."
"I'm working on a young adult novel. I've been working on it for a while, because I don't know how to write a novel and I'm teaching myself. For that reason, I've been reading a lot of YA [young adults], which I never have before. It's totally new to me."
"I don't claim to say, "All black women are like me," because they're not. One type of black woman can exist, but also another kind can exist. I also really hope that people feel permission to talk about their own troubles, but also to celebrate themselves. Sometimes I feel as though I'm trying to take a hit for the team so that other people then can move forward. I'm like, "Look, I just laid out all of my stuff, so what's the worst that can happen"?"
"I don't claim to say, "All black women are like me," because they're not."
"There's so much about the strong black woman stereotype that makes us forget that we do need and deserve help and care."
"It's always hard for me to find a therapist who is a black woman or even a woman of color. It's something that we've always been told is not for us. It's top down."
"I don't think that there are as many black women or women of color becoming psychiatrists, so we can't find them and then we feel looked at and studied and that's part of what is damaging to us. It's hard to find therapy that is actually a tool for your own liberation. I think we can be really distrustful."
"I struggle with depression and anxiety, and I have since I was a teenager. I spent a good chunk of time being very ashamed of that. Now I feel committed to talking about it and trying to normalize it as much as I can."
"I think that fear came from, "Okay, I'm going to have Beyoncé in the title, and people are just going to think, it's Beyoncé poems. It's light and fun." I was kind of super-conscious of that. It's kind of like this weird trick I'm playing, where you're like, "What an interesting, fun cover, and then the name Beyoncé." Then you open it, and it's just about my depression. All of it belongs together."
"So much of my writing process is trying to eliminate any kind of shame or fear of the thoughts that I'm having."
"Where I would usually backspace, I stop and say, "You know what? This is important, that I say how I feel and don't sugarcoat it, and don't avoid it.""
"I spent a lot of time trying to layer upon layer upon layer as I wrote. I think that's often the fear of a writer, that little nuances won't get picked up."
"In grad school, a friend and I gave ourselves the task of writing poems in the voice of Beyoncé and Lady Gaga after they did the collaboration for "Telephone." I just kind of kept going. That was quite a while ago - Beyoncé meant something very different then than she does now."
"It's been interesting to look back on those works [I've done previously] and see all the things that Beyoncé has done and become for us in the meantime, because back then, folks were like, "Why Beyoncé? I don't get why she is kind of the symbol for black womanhood.""