By the time he gets a full scholarship to Western Kentucky University for his debate skills, Jones is a roiling vessel of shame, need and anger.
Throughout How We Fight for Our Lives, readers feel the tension of Jones' adolescent and college years, as he's trying to figure out how to be. And one day, if you're lucky, your life and death will become some artist's new 'project.'" Jones recalls his younger self realizing that, " Being a black gay boy is a death wish. Granted, Jones' public high school is open-minded enough to host a touring production of The Laramie Project, the play about the hate-crime murder of Matthew Shepard but what Jones takes away from that performance is that he'd better closet himself even more securely at school. Jones' memoir effectively deep-sixes any illusions I had that it must've been a little easier in recent decades to come of age as a queer black boy in Texas. It's sometimes hard to read and harder to put down. How We Fight for Our Lives is at once explicitly raunchy, mean, nuanced, loving and melancholy. Patrick Johnson is the Dean of the School of Communication and the Carlos Montezuma Professor of Performance Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University.Johnson is a prolific performer and scholar, and an inspiring teacher, whose research and artistry has greatly impacted African American studies, Performance studies, and Gender and Sexuality studies.It's Been a Minute with Sam Sanders Saeed Jones On His Memoir, 'How We Fight For Our Lives' - And How He Fought For His The poetry collection was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as awards from Lambda Literary and the Publishing Triangle in 2015.
Saeed Jones is the author of the memoir How We Fight for Our Lives, winner of the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, and the poetry collection Prelude to Bruise, winner of the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry and the 2015 Stonewall Book Award/Barbara Gittings Literature Award. Each piece builds into a larger examination of race and queerness, power and vulnerability, love and grief: a portrait of what we all do for one another-and to one another-as we fight to become ourselves. Through a series of vignettes that chart a course across the American landscape, Jones draws readers into his boyhood and adolescence-into tumultuous relationships with his family, into passing flings with lovers, friends, and strangers. Haunted and haunting, How We Fight for Our Lives is a stunning coming-of-age memoir about a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears.
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