Sunil Yapa

I consider myself a brown American or a man of color before I would say Sri Lankan, to be honest. I didn't grow up there. There was a pretty brutal civil war there from 1983 until 2009. So we weren't able to go back very much. I've gone back as an adult. But I grew up in Pennsylvania.

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One of the important things for me is that my father is from Sri Lanka. But even more importantly, he was a consultant for the World Bank.

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I think we sometimes forget that we have so many other places to create change. My dad taught me this, but the political is one spot to make change. But so is writing a book.

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Poverty is just a word. I mean, how do you dismantle capitalism? It's through small actions. It's through breaking down poverty as a lived experience of not enough food, of your health not being good. So those are things that we can actually work on without ever having to call a politician.

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I remember so clearly from when I was five years old, my mom and dad arguing over - not over whether it was better, but whether it was proper or whether it was correct to eat with a fork or to eat with your hands, like we do in Sri Lanka. Proper. Like, what is the correct way to eat?

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It's not like being a writer is a very lucrative career, but you know, you just know when you've found what you're really meant to do.

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When I was 26 or 27, I took a year off before I was going to get my Ph.D. in geography and started traveling. And within a month, I said, 'I don't want to be academic. I want to write fiction.' And as soon as I said that - 'I'm going to write fiction' - everything in my life started to make sense.

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When I was in grad school, I had to admit I hadn't read Toni Morrison. My teacher, the novelist Colum McCann, said I had to. I read 'Beloved' and 'Song of Solomon.' Pretty incredible.

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One of my favorite authors is Michael Ondaatje.

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Tina Fey is my hero. Some of the most brilliant people don't come off as brilliant.

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