Kiese Laymon
Gawker
Contact Kiese
Discover and connect with journalists and influencers around the world, save time on email research, monitor the news, and more.
| Recent: |
|
| Past: |
|
Past articles by Kiese:
Times Six: Affirming a Pluralistic Vision of Blackness
I read Akiba Solomon for the first time in the early 2000s when she was a senior editor at The Source magazine. While Akiba's penchant for crafting sentences was on par with some of the greatest scribes of that era, it was her ability to structure features, interviews, and investigative pieces that made the fledgling young writer in me so jealous. This underappreciated ability to thoughtfully… → Read More
Times Six: On Black Life and the Horizon of Possibility
Few young creative writers in our world write so curiously and honestly out of our varied black American literary tradition as Andrew Elias Colarusso. The biracial son of an Afro-Puerto Rican mother and an Italian American father; Andrew writes, "Because I did and do have a loving relationship with my (white) biological father I cannot dismiss the whiteness he has come to represent without… → Read More
Times Six: Why True Justice Won't Come Without Sacrifice
"Art has to be a kind of confession," James Baldwin said, fifty-four years ago. "If you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too." Baldwin, more than any other American writer, showed us how every sentence contained the possibility of discovery for both writer and reader. Over the course of the ensuing… → Read More
My Vassar College Faculty ID Makes Everything OK
The fourth time a Poughkeepsie police officer told me that my Vassar College Faculty ID could make everything OK, it was three years ago on Hooker Avenue. When the white police officer, whose head was way too small for his neck, asked if my truck was stolen, I laughed, said no, and shamefully showed him my license and my ID, just like Lanre Akinsiku. The ID, which ensures that I can spend the… → Read More
How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: A Remembrance
Gawker published the essay, "How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America" last year, three weeks after George Zimmerman told Sean Hannity that the shooting of Trayvon Martin "was all God's plan." As the jury deliberates in the State vs. George Zimmerman case, we are rerunning it. → Read More
I Saw My Mother Seven Years Ago
The last time I saw my mother was seven years ago. My girlfriend Jaime and I had just bought our first home, a fixer-upper overlooking a greenbelt on a quiet street in Seattle. Instead of a housewarming party, Jaime wanted to have our moms over for lunch. → Read More
Stakes Is High—and Black Lives Are Worthy of Elaboration
The following is a True Stories conversation between Kameelah Janan Rasheed and Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah. → Read More
When God Grabs You By the Balls
I'm not a doctor but I'm an expert. In the locker room, guys exchange a wealth of age-old wisdom. A couple of times, I reset broken noses. Usually my own, but once my friend Gabriel was in bed with my friend Josephine and accidentally kneed her, and I reset her broken nose. She's still complaining, but it would have worked if she'd kept the tape on. → Read More
Raghead Alley
The other Sunday, my oldest brother, Ben, came to Fort Greene from Manhattan. It's our every-other-week ritual. → Read More
Journey to Malcolm X
May 19 marks the 89th birthday of Malcolm X. In this essay, Edward Pittman reflects on how Malcolm X influenced his search for black identity and love during the late 1970s. This essay is excerpted from Pittman's memoir, Home Before Dark. → Read More
A Kinder Way to Kill
I grew up with a killer. My father. He didn't kill in a way that would ever send him to jail. He wasn't in the military. Instead, he used the death penalty. Sometimes he called and gave the order for inmates to be executed. → Read More
Bury The Dead
On January 24, 2009, my college classmate Julian was killed in a roadside bomb blast in Afghanistan. He was twenty-five years old, and his was the first combat death in Afghanistan during the Obama presidency. His death was also the first I learned of from a Facebook wall. → Read More
The Men Who Left Were White
There are three things you should know. → Read More
Mentally Unfit
When the police found me I was standing on a subway platform, somewhere in Brooklyn, barefoot, wearing only soccer shorts in October, and crying. My hands were folded behind my head like a captured soldier. For the previous 12 hours I had wandered the streets of New York, convinced that I was being videotaped, Truman Show-style, by hidden cameras. I made my living as a public defender in Brooklyn,… → Read More
A Bed-Stuy State of Mind: Gentrification Shaken and Stirred
My first morning in Bed-Stuy was the most amazing morning of my life. I sat on the stoop and watched as the neighborhood stretched and yawned. The sun peeked over the brownstones, as weed smoke wafted through the air like the smell of breakfast bacon. Rastas swaggered up the block, their hair stuffed into stockings, crowned high on their heads. Little boys in blue pants and untucked white shirts,… → Read More
The Global Salon
The salon sat at the bottom floor of the developing world’s version of a gated community-- a five star hotel. The hotel was precariously perched, hosting an army of foreigners working on war, while staying in business under a regime denying war crimes. As a Tamil-Sri-Lankan-American I am neither entirely foreign, nor comfortably local. → Read More
Teenage Dominos: Suicide, Mimicry, and The Internet
Some people peak in high school. I wasn’t so lucky. I lost a lot of sleep as a teenager, lying in bed with my eyes glued to the stick-on glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling, trying to figure out a way to dodge the assaults from older girls that plagued me each day at John Jay High School in Westchester, New York. → Read More
What's Like the Craziest Shit You've Ever Seen
Usually, I lie. At a party, someone asks the question. It’s someone who hasn’t smelled the rancid decay of week-dead flesh or heard the rattle of fluid flooding lungs. I shake the ice in my glass, smile, and lie. When they say, “I bet you always get that question,” I roll my eyes and agree. → Read More
The Child That Wouldn't Be Born, and the One That Was
I must have been eight or nine years old. We were living in Caracas, Venezuela, where I was born and grew up. I was looking down at my cold pasta dinner in the half-remodeled kitchen of my dad’s house, facing him across the table. → Read More
What My Mother’s Death Taught Me About Life
Eight days after I buried my mother, I learned that she was considered indigent in the state of Colorado. This, above all else, broke my heart. Somehow, the knowledge that my mother was officially poor erased all the progress we’d made in the second half of her life—poof—just like that. There we were again, in the mid '80s, after my father left us, bankrupted his company and tried to bring us down… → Read More