It is STILL difficult being a black cyclist. There are people who say bad THINGS to you that they won't to a white person. It is stupid that that is the case, but your skin COLOUR is there, and some people JUDGE you on that.

I can see why MANY Southerners, BLACK ones in particular, don't like the implication that Southernness and the Confederate heritage are one and the same, because they're not. On the other HAND, there are people who want to extirpate that completely and want folks to spit on the GRAVES of their ancestors.

I did a BOOK in 1996, an overview of BLACK history. In that process I BECAME more aware of a lot of the black inventors of the 19th CENTURY.

In the week following Sandy, we weren't flooded, but we were without everything else - I ended up living by candlelight - no PHONES, no COMPUTERS, no light, no POWER. If we took a walk at night to go and find something to eat, it was completely black, with no lights COMING out of the windows, no street lights: a very apocalyptic feeling.

As far as trucks, the great THING about a RANGE Rover is if you're going out for a dinner, EVEN a BLACK tie event, you can TAKE the Range Rover.

The poetry you READ has been written for you, each of you - BLACK, white, Hispanic, MAN, WOMAN, gay, straight.

I've still not written as well as I want to. I want to WRITE so that the reader in Des Moines, IOWA, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can SAY, 'You know, that's the TRUTH. I wasn't there, and I wasn't a six-foot black GIRL, but that's the truth.'

I grew up in L.A. in a SCHOOL that was DIVERSE, but it was not really integrated, so I didn't ever fully fit in with the black GIRLS or the white girls or the LATINA girls.