Who are some of your literary influences? What do you hope people get out of this book? What was the inspiration for your book? How and why did you start working on this book? Did you have any interesting experiences where you were researching your book, or getting it published?         Who are some of your literary influences? Sapphire has been a great artistic inspiration. PUSH is one of my favorite books. Toni Morrison is my favorite writer, period; I used to read a couple books a week when I was young, but the first time I recognized myself and my world in a piece of literature was when I read the Bluest Eye when I was 12. That had never, ever happened with all the historical and contemporary "classics" I had been reading. That's when I actually stopped writing my stories with White characters and starting writing from my own experience, so that book changed the path of my life. She also wrote my favorite novel ever, Sula. I've tried to read as much nonfiction and criticism as I can, especially from people like Bell Hooks, Angela Davis, Cornel West. S.E. Hinton, James Baldwin, Dorothy Allison and Sonia Sanchez are also writers I'll pick up whenever I want to go back to something I love for a creative jolt. I also love a lot of short story writers: John Edgar Wideman, Joyce Carol Oates, Andre Dubus, Junot Diaz. I was a huge Stephen King and Ray Bradbury fan when I was young, but I just cant seem to keep up with Stephen King. Most recently, I really loved Toure's Portable Promised Land and Darnella Ford's Crave. What do you hope people get out of this book? Above all, I wrote Upstate to be a love story. I wanted to show two Black people who truly loved and cared for each other in an innocent yet mature way. In a broad sense, Black Americans’ kinship rituals necessarily adjusted because of our historical condition and this has seriously affected Black love relationships. I wanted to show a Black woman stand by her man, and vice versa. I wanted to show a Black man who looked at a Black woman not as a sexual object, but as his other equal and desirable half. I wanted to show how even during these times where Black-Americans’ overall condition bears strong comparisons to that of the slave era, Black men and women are still able to surmount incredible odds and love each other. I wanted to show the best of our love, and Antonio and Natasha are two characters who fight through pain to love each other. I also wanted to show Blacks’ amazing abilities to support, uplift and strengthen one another through trauma and tragedy. Because of the terrorism of slavery, we are still trying to rebuild as a people and I’m always amazed we have gotten this far considering just 40 years ago Jim Crow existed in the South. In Upstate, saving Antonio and Natasha is a collective effort from many people: their mothers, grandmothers, siblings, friends, teachers, other prisoners, community advocates and outside interventionists. Black people are often portrayed as a divided people, when in reality we are very unified on a micro level. We come together and stand strong when we need to. We’ve always had that spirit and it is what has helped us to survive. What was the inspiration for your book? Several personal and social factors contributed to me being inspired to write this book. Every Black person that I know has family members or friends who are incarcerated; I myself have family members, friends and former students and mentees who are or were incarcerated. The little Black boys that I’ve taught, who are beautiful and marvelous and creative now but may somehow have all of that ripped out of them by the time they reach Antonio’s age, were at the forefront of my mind. I’ve worked with organizations where a great number of the individuals being serviced are trying to rebuild their lives after incarceration. I was inspired by the fact that Black women have been tremendously affected by the prison industrial complex not only as victims of it but also in a way that has not been explored; they must “hold it down” alone while trying to maintain relationships with the fathers, brothers, boyfriends and sons who are locked up. In a more general sense, I’m inspired by the everyday, hardworking Black people I see on the streets of New York City, Chicago, down south, in the Midwest: bus drivers, nurses, teachers, crossing guards, nannies, garbage men, postal workers. Everyday, average people are the most interesting to me to write about. How and why did you start working on this book? Prisoners are loved and cared for by those they left behind through extremely expensive collect calls, infrequent visits to facilities that are often very far away, and loooong letters; it’s simply a part of life in all the worlds I’ve lived in because I’ve always been active in underserved communities, plus I’ve always stayed rooted in the underserved community from which I come. I wanted to be a writing mentor with the PEN America Prison Writing Program because I already knew how crucial writing can be when and after you are incarcerated. Letters written to and from prisoners are always brutally honest and raw; you can see hard, steel-faced men and women stripped down to their innocent cores. Their writing is desperate and poetic and holds nothing back. So the idea came to my mind to write a story about a man who is locked up and the woman who stays in his life through letters. I sat down and wrote the first letter from Antonio, and I couldn’t stop from there for an entire day. After a while, I put the project to the side and focused on making a living. The day that I KNEW I had to finish Upstate came when I read an article in Savoy magazine about research done by the Justice Policy Institute of Washington, which claimed that there were more Black men in jail in America than in college. The fact that the article compared Black men in all age groups rather than just those in the 18-24 average college age range did not matter; the fact that there is any semblance of truth to such numbers does, and as a Black woman and an educator I was deeply disturbed. I thought about the kids I was teaching in Harlem, and about how they were only in middle school and the odds were already stacked against them as far as overcoming that sad statistic. I felt like it was time to put a face on the problem, and a love story that shows how this prison epidemic has a domino effect in the Black community was a way I thought would do it. Did you have any interesting experiences where you were researching your book, or getting it published? I’ve been writing since I was 8 years old, but after two rounds of rejections for novels I had written before Upstate I realized it was possible that my dream of having a book published may never come true. I had gotten my MFA, but was unsure what that meant as far as the next phase of my life. I was having serious regrets about going into a huge amount of debt for my education and to live in New York. My mentor Sapphire told me to tough NYC out, but I had made up my mind to move back to my hometown with my tail between my legs. I had submitted a very rough version of Upstate for my master’s thesis, and was convinced that the manuscript—like my other novel—would be just another disappointment. I wanted to go home, make some money and if I happened to sell a book then fine and if I didn’t, oh well. Sensing that I was about to let the novel and my career fall by the wayside, Sapphire convinced me that it was worth it to stay in Harlem, even taking her copy of Upstate (the only one in the universe at that time) and dropping it off to a friend who was an agent. That agent friend was Tracy Sherrod. Tracy was so passionate about the book that she had already line-edited and completed margin notes on Upstate by the time we met for the first time at Mobay’s restaurant on 125th in Harlem, and I told her I would get her back a revision in two weeks. Two weeks turned to over 3 months because I got a job teaching creative writing to kids in Brownsville, Brooklyn—a 1 and 15 minute commute from my apartment on 147th Street. I had to get up every morning at 6:00 am and usually didn’t get home until around 7. I was usually in bed by 11. The pay was low so I was still broke but I was dedicated to my job at the day camp, which serviced over 200 kids. Because of the time I spent getting to the job and preparing for it, there was little time left to revise Upstate. I eventually got around to it, shortly towards the end of the summer when I was unemployed again; being out of a job reminded me that I had an agent promising to sell my novel. I got a job teaching writing and literacy at a high school in the Bronx through the National Puerto Rican Forum in September, but was laid off after a month because of budget cuts. Behind on bills and without any income in sight, I sent my agent a long email and told her I was giving up and moving back to Illinois with my parents by the middle of October. The next week, the phone started ringing off the hook with publishers wanting to buy Upstate.