Laymon’s Terms
June 20, 2023
David Silverberg
When Kiese Laymon looks back on his Oberlin years, he does not mince words.
“Being there, at a place that valued young Black artists, literally saved my life,” says the 1998 grad, an author and professor who was named a MacArthur Fellow last fall. At Oberlin, Laymon immersed himself among creators who were making lively, inspiring art. He was also inspired by the discipline he saw in so many others around him there.
“I remember in my first year, I was going for a run at 7 a.m. and I see this young kid—he looked 14—was coming out of his dorm room with a cello that was bigger than him,” he recalls. “And I asked him what he was doing up this early. He said, ‘Practice,’ and I immediately thought Wow, the game has changed here. This is serious stuff.”
After earning a BA in English at Oberlin, then an MFA at Indiana University, he went on to write two books—the novel Long Division and the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America—both originally published in 2013. The story of time-traveling Mississippi teens, Long Division was optioned by comedian Trevor Noah to become a TV series and was the winner of the 53rd NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in the fiction category.
In 2018, Laymon released Heavy: An American Memoir, an eloquent and raw coming-of-age story featuring unflinching insights into his issues with body image, violence, and gambling. In between these deep works, each of them examining the Black American experience through the lens of his Mississippi upbringing, Laymon also wrote for Vanity Fair, the New York Times, and ESPN.com, among other major outlets.
I’m now in a new tax bracket. I know things will shift for me in terms of writing about race and class, and I’m prepared to write about that change.
Then in October 2022 Laymon learned that he had won an esteemed MacArthur Fellowship. He’ll receive $800,000, paid out in equal quarterly installments over five years, with no strings attached. He is the 13th Oberlin alumnus to be fêted with a so-called “Genius Grant,” and the first since musician Rhiannon Giddens in 2017.
When he first got the call, six weeks before the official announcement, Laymon thought it was a joke perpetrated by his friend and fellow author, Reginald Dwayne Betts. “He once told me he’d prank me about getting a Genius Grant, so I thought it was him playing around with me. And it all didn’t really feel real until the announcement came out.”
What Laymon plans to do with the prize isn’t confirmed, he says, but one cause he’ll continue to support is the Catherine Coleman Literary Arts, Food and Justice Initiative, which he founded and named after his grandmother.
Headquartered at Jackson State University, the foundation offers free writing workshops to public school students who are mentored by students, faculty, and guests from the university’s creative writing program. Originally established at the University of Mississippi when Laymon was a member of the school’s English and creative writing faculty, the initiative relocated to his hometown in fall 2022—an announcement made shortly after the MacArthur news broke. (“My grandmama sent all her daughters to Jackson State,” he said at the time, noting the personal significance of the move.) The first group of student workshops are happening this summer.
Laymon has taught at the University of Mississippi, Vassar College, and for the
past two-plus years at Rice University. Immersion in academia feels natural for him, in no small part because his mother taught political science for 35 years, retiring from Jackson State in 2007.
“I wouldn’t be a professor without her,” he admits, “and she not only gave me a literary taste, because I was surrounded by books as a kid, but I have always admired her relationships with students. Sometimes, she would invite students to our place when they didn’t have a home to go to for Thanksgiving or Christmas.”
Laymon even studied for a semester at Jackson State when his mother was still teaching on campus; he soon left “because she was all up in my business,” he says with a laugh.
Change and revision have been at the heart of Laymon’s work recently, particularly in the reissued essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, which came about after he bought back the rights from his publisher. “Securing the rights to my books, revising them, and publishing them the way they want to be published are the most loving acts I could do for my work, my body, my Mississippi,” Laymon writes in the author’s note.
Poignantly written with sharp takeaways on race and relationships, the new edition finds Laymon “[writing] from Mississippi about our current awakening,” he writes. “The movement of the essays is painted in regret and revelry.” His passion for hip-hop glows in one piece, while another pointedly suggests how he will “not allow American ideals of patriotism and masculinity to make me hard, abusive, generic, and brittle.”
In a new opening essay set at the beginning of the 2020 pandemic, Laymon deftly writes about how political and racial tensions in Mississippi are a microcosm of America itself. The piece weaves together multiple thematic threads: anxiety about the growing spread of coronavirus and concerns about keeping family members healthy; the removal of the Mississippi flag but the protection of Confederate monuments, both of which happen against a backdrop of national uprisings after the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor; and the ways entrenched racism and violence perpetuate themselves throughout history.
“Phantoms move at their own speed,” Laymon writes.
In between teaching courses at Rice, Laymon is working on two new books, Good God and City Summer, Country Summer. He also plans to write about how his newfound wealth affects him. “I’m now in a new tax bracket,” he says.
“I know things will shift for me in terms of writing about race and class, and I’m prepared to write about that change.”
And what drew a young Laymon from Mississippi to Oberlin? He had long been a fan of the late sociologist and author Calvin Hernton, who wrote the groundbreaking study Sex and Racism in America in 1965 and was a professor of African American studies at Oberlin until his retirement in 1999. “He was brilliant and so kind to me,” Laymon says.
Writing and editing became hobbies outside the classroom too. He was editor-in-chief at the literary magazine Nommo and worked for a time as opinions editor at the Oberlin Review.
“They were all so different and so challenging in a great way,” he remembers.
It was also Oberlin, he adds, that introduced him to two tasty treats he now loves: tofu and hummus. “I wasn’t a vegetarian until my first week at Oberlin,” he says. “I’d been trying, but couldn’t give up fish. That first week, I gave it up. Haven’t had it since.”
The Laymon Library
Long Division
A novel that blends elements of time travel and mystery, this coming-of-age story charts the world of two Black teens in the southern U.S., in search of themselves amid a flurry of expectations from family and society. It has been optioned by comedian Trevor Noah for a TV series.
Learn more about Laymon’s Long Division.
How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
This incisive, poignant collection of essays includes letters to the author’s mother and uncle; a fictional presidential debate; observations on celebrity; and Laymon’s recognition of his own complicity in the misogynist treatment of Black women.
Learn more about Laymon’s How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America.
Heavy: An American Memoir
Laymon’s memoir explores his complicated relationship with his mother, as well as his struggles with eating, addiction, and gambling. Along the way, it touches on themes related to universal quests for truth, reconciliation, and love.
Learn more about Laymon’s Heavy: An American Memoir.
David Silverberg is a freelance writer based in Toronto. Additional reporting by Annie Zaleski.
This story originally appeared in the Spring 2023 issue of the Oberlin Alumni Magazine.
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