Kiese Laymon
Ohio University’s Spring Literary Festival is April 3 to 5. One of this year’s featured authors is Kiese Laymon, a black southern writer, born and raised in Jackson, Miss. Laymon attended Millsaps College and Jackson State University before graduating from Oberlin College.
He earned an MFA in Fiction from Indiana University. Laymon is currently the Ottilie Schillig Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi. He served as the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Nonfiction at the University of Iowa in Fall 2017.
Laymon is the author of the novel, Long Division, and a collection of essays, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and Heavy: An American Memoir.
Heavy, shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal and the Kirkus Prize, was named one of the Best Books of 2018 by the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, NPR, Broadly, The Undefeated, Library Journal, The Washington Post, Southern Living, Entertainment Weekly, and The New York Times Critics. It was also named Audible’s Audiobook of the Year.
Laymon has written essays, stories and reviews for numerous publications including Esquire, McSweeneys, New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, ESPN the Magazine, Colorlines, NPR, LitHub, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, PEN Journal, Fader, Oxford American, Vanity Fair, The Best American Series, Ebony, Travel and Leisure, Paris Review, Guernica, and more.
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