UCA hosts virtual reading from writer Kiese Laymon
UCA hosts virtual reading from writer Kiese Laymon
Kiese Laymon
courtesy of UCA
Writer
Kiese Laymon (“Heavy: An American Memoir,” “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America,” “Long Division”) will give a public reading via Zoom as an artist-in-residence at the University of Central Arkansas Feb. 23-24.
Laymon is currently the Hubert H. McAlexander chair of English at the University of Mississippi, where he founded the Catherine Coleman Initiative for the Arts and Social Justice — a program aimed, Laymon’s bio states, “at getting Mississippi kids and their parents, more comfortable reading, writing, revising and sharing,” his bio states. He’s a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, and his work has appeared in the The New York Times, Esquire, Colorlines, The Lost Angeles Times, The Guardian, Ebony, Lit Hub and Arkansas’s own Oxford American magazine. It often blends comedy and solemnity in the same breath, and has become for many one of the most vital and unflinching sets of narratives about what it means to be Black in America right now. If you’ve yet to buy or borrow a copy of Laymon’s memoir “Heavy,” check out his 2019 essay for the OA, “Bedtime Songs,” in the interim, or Jerald Walker’s meditation for the New York Times on Laymon’s deftness at drawing readers stirringly close to his own experiences.