The things that make us different, those are our superpowers.
To be yourself is truly a revolutionary act, and I think more and more people should try it, because it's gotten me a pretty cool life.
I'm writing my story so that others might see fragments of themselves.
To be a black person is to come from a long bloodline of survivors and storytellers, with a resilience that people can't even comprehend.
I'm not asking for there to be all black writer's rooms or all Asian writer's rooms, or all white - I want them all to be diverse. When it's diverse, you're going to have a completely different dynamic. Everybody feels othered. Nobody feels like they've got the upper hand.
The '80s really were - talk about no rules. People just did whatever they wanted; they could look however they wanted. There was just a lot of bigness and brightness.
Being born gay, black, and female is not a revolutionary act. Being proud to be a gay black female is.
I definitely have been very mindful of what kind of leader and creator I want to be. A lot of that has to with looking at the writers that you work with. They're all like your children. They all need love, but different versions of it.
I think that for the most part, black people specifically have sort of been used as props in TV shows as a way to move story along or as a way to make things more entertaining.
Maybe some young girl seeing me on the Emmy stage may have meant something for them.
I actually really liked 'The Help.' I know that may not be a popular thing, but I thought it was a solid film. It wasn't 'Roots.' It wasn't 'The Color Purple.' But you couldn't pick it apart in terms of storytelling, and I thought the characters were well written.
Obviously, I love Steph Curry. I think he's dope and a really cool player to watch.
My family still lives in Chicago: my mother, my sister, my nephew, my family is there. So even though I am not living there, I feel very close to it, and I visit very often.
Being on Netflix lets us be experimental. We can do crazy things.
There's been a lot of successful shows like 'This Is Us,' 'Atlanta,' and 'Insecure,' so, I feel like whenever something works, Hollywood wants to copy it.
I sort of knew very early on that I wanted to be a writer. Even in high school, I was a big movie buff, very much into TV shows, and would critique them.
I never had everything I wanted, but I never wanted for anything.
I loved 'The Wizard Of Oz.' It was, like, you know how some kids, they're crying, and they put on - people put on 'Frozen' to get them to chill and just be quiet? For my family, it was 'The Wizard Of Oz.' They would literally tell babysitters, if she gets - like, if she starts misbehaving or she starts acting crazy, just put 'The Wizard Of Oz' on.
Being a black lesbian myself, I roll my eyes a little bit when I see black lesbian characters on shows where it's purely there for decoration. You can just hear it in the writers room... 'What if we make her a lesbian?'
I write for my people.
