THE PROPHETS VIRTUAL BOOK TOUR: PEN World Voices Festival

Kiese Laymon, Robert Jones Jr., and Brian Broome come together as writers, readers, and literary citizens to explore Black love and performances of Black masculinity—both its manifestations in the body and mind.

Laymon’s satirical first novel, Long Division (soon to be re-released), travels time to depict the journeys of two Black teenagers coming of age under the shadow of history in Mississippi, as the author “cleverly interweaves his narrative threads and connects characters in surprising and seemingly impossible ways” (Kirkus Reviews). Robert Jones Jr.’s The Prophets breathes life into new dimensions of Black history with a queer love story between men in the antebellum South. Reviewing the book in The New York Times, poet Danez Smith called it a “lyrical and rebellious love story embedded within a tender call-out to Black readers, reaching across time and form to shake something old, mighty in the blood.” In his “magnificent and harrowing” (Publishers Weekly) debut memoir, Punch Me Up to the Gods, Brian Broome evokes both the necessity and the toll of self-preservation growing up as a dark-skinned queer boy in America’s heartland.

In their explorations of queerness, vulnerability, and tenderness, these three artists chart the path to what Laymon has called “Black abundance”—not a destination but a process of becoming, of astounding society’s low expectations for Black men and women with unimpeachable excellence.

Saturday, May 22, 2021
4 p.m. EDT
RSVP: https://bit.ly/3e2xvyY