The Zone 3 Visiting Writers Series, the Betty Joe Wallace Memorial Lecture, and the Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts (CECA, or “seek-ah”) will host a free public event with McArthur Genius Fellow Kiese Laymon at 7 p.m. on Thursday, March 20, in Mabry Concert Hall. The nationally acclaimed author will read from and discuss his life and work, followed by a Q&A session and book signing. Read more here.
Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon is the Libbie Shearn Moody Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rice University. Laymon is the author of Long Division, which won the 2022 NAACP Image Award for fiction, and the essay collection, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, named a notable book of 2021 by the New York Times critics. Laymon’s bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Barnes and Noble Discovery Award, the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, and was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. The audiobook, read by the author, was named the Audible 2018 Audiobook of the Year. Laymon is the recipient of 2020-2021 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard. Laymon is at work on the books, Good God, and City Summer, Country Summer, and a number of other film and television projects. He is the founder of The Catherine Coleman Literary Arts and Justice Initiative, a program based out of the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University, aimed at aiding young people in Jackson get more comfortable reading, writing, revising and sharing on their on their own terms, in their own communities. He is the co-host of Reckon True Stories with Deesha Philyaw. Kiese Laymon was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.
This casual event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.
For questions or more information about the Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts, visit www.apsu.edu/ceca or email Dr. Andrea Spofford at spofforda@apsu.edu. For questions about Zone 3 and its events, you can email zone3@apsu.edu.
