Sunil Yapa

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.