KIESE LAYMON is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. In his observant, often hilarious work, Laymon does battle with the personal and the political: race and family, body and shame, poverty and place. His savage humor and clear-eyed perceptiveness have earned him comparisons to Ta-Nehisi Coates, Alice Walker, and Mark Twain. He is the author of the award-winning memoir Heavy, the groundbreaking essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and the genre-defying novel Long Division.
Laymonโs memoir Heavy won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the 2018 Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, and was named one of the Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times.
A personal narrative that illuminates national failures, Heavy is defiant yet vulnerableโan insightful, often comical exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, and family.
The recipient of an NAACP Image Award for fiction, Laymon is the Libby Shearn Moody Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rice University. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.