This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Ramnick.

Staff writer Julian Lucas traveled to Los Angeles recently to interview an author

who's been on his radar and on his mind for the better part of the past 15 years.

Do you feel more like a Californian New Englander or a New Yorker?

That's the main split in my identity.

The biracial thing is so small.

Like I'm really like which place do I belong I'm still conflicted about.

The writer is Danzy Sena and her big subject in novels, stories, and essays

is the experience of navigating America's very complicated racial lines.

Sena's new novel is called Colored Television. Here's Julian Lucas.

So I first came to Danzy's work in college when I read her essay The Molado Millennium.

And to me, having grown up biracial in Northern New Jersey, discovering Danzy's work was

so important to me because I had never before read anyone who captured the experience of being

black identified but racially ambiguous in a country that was increasingly putting enormous expectations

on who we were and what kind of world we were supposed to bring about.

And one thing that I've always loved about Sena's work is its irreverence, and her

latest novel is no exception.

The story that with an enormous amount of humor and compassion and

also irony and sarcasm gets at the changing nature of biracial identity in America today and also the way that pop

culture shapes how all of us see ourselves.

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