Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $40)

Step 2: Register for “Writing and Resistance” here

In this workshop, writers Robert Jones Jr. and Kiese Laymon will join us for a generative conversation on the roles and responsibilities of writers undertaking the work of resistance, truth-telling, and community care. The conversation will be moderated by Deesha Philyaw and will include a brief audience Q&A.

Robert Jones, Jr. (formerly known as “Son of Baldwin”) is a Brooklyn-based writer and public speaker. He is the author of The New York Times bestselling novel, The Prophets, which won the 2022 Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction, and was named one of “The 25 Most Influential Works of Postwar Queer Literature” by The New York Times.

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. Kiese Laymon was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.

Deesha Philyaw is the author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, which won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. Deesha is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, a Baldwin for the Arts Fellow, a United States Artists Fellow, and co-host of two podcasts, Ursa Short Fiction (with Dawnie Walton) and Reckon True Stories (with Kiese Laymon).