29 April 2019
When I met author Colson Whitehead at a 2011 event, I was starstruck. Meeting incredibly talented writers does that to me, because they represent what I want to be when I grow up. Since I'm 50-something, most would assume I've missed out on that, but most also don't know how many decades I've invested in my dream-or how much of that time I've spent coming to terms with cultural appropriation in fiction, a topic Whitehead recently addressed as keynote speaker at the 2019 Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference.