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Describe your latest book.
Following up my National Book Award–winning Stamped From the Beginning, I sought to create an original approach to understanding and uprooting racism and inequality in our society — and in ourselves. After all, the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it — and then dismantle it. I hope that my new book, How to Be an Antiracist, reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America — but even more fundamentally, that it points humanity toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. In How to Be an Antiracist, I ask us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it.

I combine ethics, history, law, and science, threading it all together with personal stories of my own personal awakening to antiracism. How to Be an Antiracist is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond an awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a truly just and equitable society...

The writer is one who writes, of course; but sometimes the writer is also one who has to change her outfit because you can’t wear Catch-22 earrings with a Wizard of Oz T-shirt, or who must explain the meaning of her “I Would Prefer Not To” tote bag to her dental hygienist in the midst of a cleaning (“iz from a swort sory by Hewman Mevee”), or who holds up airport security while arguing with the TSA agent that reading is sexy just as the sticker on her laptop claims.

I tell my students a writer is someone who pays attention to language, who is observant, who acknowledges the complexities of life; but perhaps I should tell them about the merch...

Today my first book, America Is Better Than This: Trump’s War Against Migrant Families, comes out.

Why did I call it that? Because what the White House has done to limit both legal and illegal migration is illegal and cruel — and it threatens to change the fundamental fabric of who we are as a country.

Nowhere was this disconnect more apparent than at the State of the Union. On that day the most powerful people in Washington gathered, alongside the nation’s media, to take stock of where we are as a nation, and where we’re headed. On that self-important night in early 2019, amid all the senators and Supreme Court justices, all the TV reporters and celebrity guests, were two humble young women from Guatemala...

My son tells me there’s a woman made of garbage who lives in our walls. He tells me this at night, while we’re trying to go to sleep in my dim bedroom, his father out of town.

“Her name’s Trish,” my son says, “and she’s so nice.” He yawns.

I’ve perfected the art of minimizing my reaction to the creepy things my kids say and do. One night, my older son sat on a stool next to me while I washed dishes.

“Remember before I was born,” he said, “when I used to just hang out in your apartment and watch you live your life?”

I didn’t drop the glass I was washing, didn’t slowly back away from him, snap up my car keys and drive away forever. I calmly dried the glass, ran through an incriminating catalog of my pre-mom behavior, and hoped he wouldn’t offer up any proof.

That son learned to talk early — a little too early, maybe...

How would you describe your job to someone you just met?
I work with the store locations to round up every item ordered on Powells.com, as well as on our online partner marketplaces, and ship them from the warehouse to customers around the world.

Last book you loved:
Letters to the Lost by Brigid Kemmerer. I sat down to read this one night at about 50 pages in and got lost in it. I stayed up until nearly 4 a.m. because I just had to finish it.

Where are you originally from?
Green Bay, Wisconsin. I have been in the Pacific Northwest for 10 years now, and I have no intention of leaving.

What did you want to be when you grew up?
A veterinarian or a landscape architect, but...

Quartzite is a tiny town in La Paz County, Arizona. It’s one of those bright, gone-in-an-instant flashes along Interstate 10 that feels utterly roofless — all sun and open sky — and yet, somehow, simultaneously full of secrets. During winter months, a glut of gem shows draws streams of vacationing snowbirds to its main thoroughfare. Pride of place in its solitary graveyard belongs to a squat, brilliantly tiled pyramid, a mausoleum whose shape might strike blow-ins as odd, but not especially out of place. Pyramids, after all, belong in the desert. So do camels — and this particular pyramid happens to be topped with the rusty silhouette of one of those. To an unknowing visitor, the whole ensemble might look like just another piece of desert kitsch.

In truth, however, this unlikely monument is the “last camp” and final resting place of a man identified by the grave-marker as “Hi Jolly.”...

A while back I was meeting with an editor — not mine. She asked me to name another writer whose career I wanted to emulate. My answer: I don’t think like that. I want to do my own thing. That’s when the editor advised me to pick a lane. She meant that I should just write either regular crime novels (like The Passenger) or comedic ones (like the Spellman series). All of this experimenting and coloring outside the lines — Heads You Lose, How to Start a Fire — was bad for my career, she suggested.

That editor may have been correct on the whole. I get the argument for not alienating your readers by writing something vastly different from your previous book...

This week we're taking a closer look at Powell's Pick of the Month An American Sunrise by Joy Harjo.

Over the last, distressing two weeks, it’s been an unexpected jolt of joy to remember that our current U.S. Poet Laureate is Joy Harjo. Even now, when so much bigotry is being sanctioned or tolerated or passively renounced by America’s leaders, the official poet of the United States is a Native woman (Muscogee Creek Nation) whose work is inspired by First Nation history and traditions, and rooted in social justice and feminism. If Washington is a swamp, Harjo’s appointment is like chancing upon a field of marsh marigold; it’s an encouraging reminder that not everything in our capital needs to be drained....