As a child, I would scare myself looking at the pictures in medical books. I’ve always been deeply afraid of bodies. I didn’t set out to write a book about the body – I think that was all subconscious stuff that was trying to come out of me, that I was fighting against. The stories also explore aspects of physicality. You’re reshaping an ongoing conversation. I wanted to see more stories about awkward, nerdy black people, and black people who were the only ones in a particular space, and what it meant to navigate the many different kinds of identity construct. I’d grown up feeling like I was the only black person like myself, though of course that wasn’t the case. I want to read more about people who have had experiences similar to my own. I wanted to think about what it means to be a black person today but also respond to what James McCune Smith was theorising almost 200 years ago. Much of it is dealing with the same issues we’re dealing with today – and now we have a president who is very vocal about his racism.

My husband is a professor of literature and he writes a lot about McCune Smith and other 19th-century writers who were publishing sketches in Frederick Douglass’s newspapers – he would come downstairs excited and talk about this research. The title of your collection comes from the 19th-century abolitionist James McCune Smith and his sketches Heads of the Colored People. The collection has been shortlisted for the Gordon Burn prize. Her debut short-story collection, Heads of the Colored People, which portrays the lives of contemporary African Americans, was described by Booker prize winner George Saunders as “vivid, fast, funny, way-smart and verbally inventive”. Nafissa Thompson-Spires was born in San Diego, California and studied creative writing as a graduate student at the University of Illinois and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Heads of the colored people stories