Life in Woke America follows an Army private who discovers a secret Chinese bioweapon, leading him to question the institutions he trusted. You described your book as autofiction inspired by true events. What inspired you to combine personal experience with fictional storytelling?

My work as a Court Appointed Special Advocate connects me with high school-age boys who have avoided run-ins with law enforcement and tell me that they think about thinking. These boys I enjoy and who have the ability to move from the margins of society to the upper levels of America’s middle class and higher. Very few do, and most don’t. This novel is inspired by what it takes for any of these boys to make this kind of success happen.

What did you want Xavier’s development from someone without a stable family to someone actively creating one to reveal about him?

My work with these boys has taken place during a specific “age” in America. This age is uniquely defined by the COVID pandemic, a focus on marginalized groups, and billion-dollar sports franchises, among other things. Similar novels have told stories of the Industrial Revolution, the Civil War, and more. The story I tell reveals how this era presented a certain set of challenges and opportunities for Xavier and how he responded. His choices reveal much about the society in which he found himself, and the boy who becomes a man of significance.

Considering the political focus suggested by the title, the novel devotes substantial attention to romance and family. Why was that personal side of Xavier’s life so important to the larger story?

I like to remind people that you cannot tell a book by its cover. I could just as easily have titled the book Life in a Sports-Crazed America, and told the same story. My point is this isn’t a political story, nor a polemic. I describe real events of this era and let the character develop as he matures. It isn’t that the personal side is so important to the larger story; it is the larger story. And sometimes I am amused by how often people assume it is otherwise.

The final image of life as a mosaic brings together many different pieces of Xavier’s experience. What does that metaphor mean to you?

I really enjoyed writing that poem. It turned out so much better than the same message in prose. Much like the comment about being fooled by the title, he tells Mrs. Pearson that she has been deceived into viewing people as stereotyped members of a group defined by physical attributes. Xavier is reminding her that by referring to the beauty of his mosaic derives from many individual tiles. This metaphor flows from the U.S. Constitution’s deliberate claim that all human rights belong to the individual–America’s greatness is its plurality of individuals, not the state of one group or another.

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