F.A.Q.
How did you become a writer?
I was always a bookworm. But I became a writer when I became an immigrant. My family moved from Lusaka, Zambia, where I was born, to Hull, England, when I was two for a short stint. According to my father, my favorite book that year was Mr. Magnolia Has Only One Boot. He also reports that I came up with my first simile in his office there. I was sitting on the floor, drawing pictures while he worked at his desk. And I looked up and said, “D’you know, Papa? Suns are like spiders.” He peered down at my sheet of paper and, sure enough, I had drawn a circle with eight spokes.
We moved back to Zambia shortly before I turned five, and when I was eight and a half, we moved to a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland in the United States. I basically lived at the Pikesville public library and was enrolled in an after school program on science fiction, where we read The Tripod Trilogy—my introduction to that genre. I still have the small red spiral notebook that I kept at the time. Inside you can find, in painstaking cursive, my full name, my address, and a set of notes for my own stories with titles such as “Friends Forever… I hope,” “Brainy Magic,” and “Gymnastics and Horses Don’t Rhyme.” Titular genius aside, what strikes me about all of these ideas now is that they reflect a lonely young brown girl trying to make sense of a new world.
In high school, I wrote a lot of bad poetry and was on the literary magazine staff. But I studied microbiology in the magnet program there and started off as a Biology major in college. I switched to the English major in my second semester, after reading Paradise Lost, which I sometimes call my “gateway drug.”
Why did you get a PhD in Literature?
After graduation, I moved back in with my parents in Takoma Park, Maryland and worked for a few months at a bookstore, which turned into a toy store. I then worked as an editorial assistant at a press publishing research from the National Academy of Sciences in Washington D.C. These were very boring but very useful jobs, in that I learned about the financial and editorial side of the book world, and also in that I decided I didn’t want to be part of either.
I went to graduate school because I still wanted to write fiction and I felt I needed to read more to do so. I also needed money to support myself and had student loans to pay off and there weren’t very many funded MFA programs at the time. So, with the model and advice of my older sister, I applied for fully funded PhD programs. I deeply relished my six years of graduate school, which me paid a modest living to read and write and teach literature.
Why did you become a professor of literature?
Again, I needed to support myself. I got a position as a tenure-track assistant professor right before the 2008 recession; I doubt I’d be a professor now otherwise. If I hadn’t gotten a job, my plan was to move home to Zambia, where my parents had returned in 2002, and write fiction. That said, a university job is, as Vladimir Nabokov once noted, as good a place as any for a writer to have a day job: “A first-rate college library with a comfortable campus around it is a fine milieu for a writer. There is, of course, the problem of educating the young.” I got tenure in 2014 and became a full professor in 2020. I tend to teach courses I wish I could take; I prefer to write for an audience beyond the academy; and I let curiosity lead me more than any sense of mastery or professional obligation.
What is your advice to writers?
I don’t believe in “craft,” which is too schematic a term for how writing works. I tend to revise as I go but I believe more in “revision” as a process that takes place with my readers: my sister, my close friends, and my partner. My two main pieces of advice for aspiring writers are: 1. read more and 2. know thyself.
First, why are you a writer if you don’t read? You may as well just write in your diary. Writing is a conversation across time with other writers; E.M. Forster saw all the English novelists he wrote about in Aspects of Fiction “seated together in a room, a circular room. . . all writing their novels simultaneously.” It may seem insular but it is in fact grandly expansive. As Toni Morrison once said, “Writing to me is an advanced and slow form of reading.”
And second, stop trying to suit the needs of anyone else when it comes to your writing process. Figure out how you already work—your best and worst habits, sensitivities and capabilities, talents and liabilities as a writer—and then build a process that accommodates that, rather than the other way around.
What is your advice to writers about getting published?
Ask yourself this question: Why do you want to publish? Read this Emily Dickinson poem and think about it some more. If you still want to publish, ask yourself these two questions: One, whom do you want to reach with your work? And two, what sort of published work do you like to read? Seek out the venues, agents, and editors interested in the same kind of work and the same kind of audience. You can find lists of these online to apply to. I found my agent through the first short story I published, “Muzungu,” which I submitted in a stamped envelope to a call for papers for new African literature by a small magazine called Callaloo. When that story was published and selected for The Best American Short Stories, my agent reached out directly to me.
What is your writing routine?
When I’m not teaching, I write in the late morning/ early afternoon after eating a very late breakfast. I prefer to write when I’m a little sleepy, with direct sunlight on me, outside if possible. But I am not fussy about where I write; I can’t afford to be. I write on my laptop, using Word, which is janky, but a janky that I know. It is best for me and for the fiction when I stick to three hours every other day. I can do five hours every day if it’s nonfiction or criticism. I don’t recommend my routine to anyone else. The best “routine” is the one that suits your writing (see this book for sheer variety of routines).
What is the relationship between your criticism and your fiction?
I started writing fiction much earlier; I really only began writing criticism as an assistant professor, with a significant uptick after I got tenure. I love writing about film and television in particular; if I could go back to school, it would be to study either film or philosophy. The critic and the fiction writer in me appear to have a Jekyll/Hyde relationship—one of them is always scrawling blasphemous marginalia in the other’s work. I’m aware that the two are in conversation, and I find it fascinating when other people try to transcribe that conversation, but I’d rather not be privy to it myself—it would limit my sense of freedom with both genres. In general, I think we overstate these divisions. Again, to quote Morrison, “I read books. I teach books. I write books. I think about books. It’s one job.” That said, I do not have an idea and then decide which genre to express it in—the idea comes with its ideal form.
How do you know when a piece of writing is done?
It is never done; I often revise as I’m reading aloud at events; I keep a running tab of changes to make if I ever get the chance to republish or reprint my work. But I know a piece of writing has to go to my editor or into a virtual drawer when I’m too sick of my own words to try to fix them anymore.
What was it like writing The Old Drift for twenty years?
I didn’t take twenty years to write The Old Drift. I started it in 2000, worked on it off-and-on while I was writing my dissertation, then put it aside in 2008 to work on another novel and to turn my dissertation into an academic book, Seven Modes of Uncertainty, for which I got tenure. When an excerpt of The Old Drift, “The Sack,” was nominated for the Caine Prize in 2015, I returned to it to revise the scattered third I’d drafted. When I won the prize and got a book contract, I finished writing the remaining two thirds over the course of about two years, during most of which I wasn’t teaching because I was on medical, family, and sabbatical leave. It was then another two-year process of revision, cutting, and responding to edits before publication in 2019.
Is your writing autobiographical?
Like every writer, my work cobbles together fragments from my memories, dreams, fantasies, experiences, projections, and history. But I would find it extremely dull to sit down and write about myself. For me, the point of writing is to escape myself, to immerse myself in the lives and art of other people.
Do you think of yourself as an African writer or an American writer?
I’m a dual citizen of Zambia, where I was born and lived for much of my childhood and some of my adolescence, and America, where I received my undergraduate and graduate education and continue to live and work. I am full of admiration for aspects of both places, and for writers from either side of the Atlantic, from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o to Gayl Jones. So I’d be honored to be included among them on any of the bluntly segregated shelves of the library or bookstore. I have plenty of criticism for the nation state, as such, but I’m happy to be claimed by any nation that wishes to claim me, especially if they’re willing to grant me the freedom to live and work. Like many artists, I find purposeful nomadism suits me better than nominal patriotism.
What’s next?
My book about Toni Morrison, On Morrison, will be published in January 2026. I have about five novels in my head that I want to finish writing, some set in Zambia, some in the U.S., some conceived as early as 2002, others as recently as 2019. I think of them as plots of land and the copious draft material and notes as seeds I’ve planted. I’m not sure which garden I’ll have time to cultivate next but I’m inclined toward three right now: one about a black home care nurse in D.C.; one, a comic family drama; and one, about a religious figure from Zambian history.