There isn't a lot of poverty literature in the young-adult world. And I don't know why that is, but I think certainly I felt a gap.

The problem is that too many adults think their kids' lives are simple, or they try to make their lives simple, when their emotional lives are just as complicated as ours. They might have a few less tools to deal with it because they're young, but the emotions are all the same, and the subject matter is all the same.

I don't think there's a whole lot of class literature at all. I think most of that has become racially based, and people don't think of it as being class literature.

Sherman Alexie Quotes