Growing up in Jackson during the 1980s, Kiese Laymon found a great deal of inspiration to take from watching the rising hip-hop scene of the era. Listening to young Black people making art out of words moved him deeply and instilled a desire to move crowds in similar ways.
While he didn’t feel he could rap the way musical artists did, his mother—Jackson State University professor Mary Coleman—encouraged her son to take up writing instead. He wrote a few pieces for his school newspaper at St. Joseph High School in Jackson, which has since relocated to Madison, and went on to Millsaps College eager to play basketball as he continued his writing efforts.
Shortly after enrolling at Millsaps, Laymon suffered a bout of depression that led him to abandon sports during his time there. However, he stuck with writing as an emotional and creative outlet, and he took to writing opinion columns for the school newspaper after a classmate convinced him to submit a piece about institutional racism that Laymon had written for one of his classes.
After the paper’s editor approved his column, Laymon took to writing more satirical pieces about himself, the Greek system at Millsaps and other critiques on campus life.
“My aim was to write as if I had come up with my own definition of Millsaps, in layman’s terms, but because this was something of my own I called it ‘Laymon’s Terms,’ he told the Mississippi Free Press. “I wanted to give anyone who read my work a simple view of Millsaps as if it came from someone with an outside perspective.”
Over the course of a year Laymon wrote a number of critiques on what he saw as college faculty treating Black workers and women poorly but found that many people often dismissed the concerns he attempted to raise. Laymon says his writings on the college also made him deeply unpopular with members of the campus’ administration, which he says came to a head when Millsaps suspended him at age 19 over taking a book out of the library without checking it out first.
Undeterred, Laymon enrolled at Jackson State University later that year and from there went on to Oberlin College in Ohio and later received a graduate degree in fiction writing from Indiana University in Bloomington.
After graduating, he spent 13 years working as an educator at various schools in New York before returning to Mississippi, where he took a teaching position at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. He remained there for four years before transferring to Rice University in Houston, Texas, where currently works as the Libbie Shearn Moody professor of English and creative writing.
“Everything I write is rooted in Jackson,” Laymon said. “I spent my childhood there and have always loved it. My life here, and in Mississippi as a whole, is what matters the most to me. I love to write about Mississippi’s music and culture, the families and relationships you’ll find here and the generational change that has occurred over the years, from the Mississippi my grandmother grew up in to the ones that my mother and then I grew up in.”
‘Always Revise’
Laymon considers his book “Heavy: An American Memoir” to be his most defining work. Published in 2018, Laymon’s memoir won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction among other awards, and the New York Times named the book one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years.
“‘Heavy’ does two important things in my eyes,” Laymon explained. “First, it places itself between a young Black boy and the idea of coming of age in Mississippi. Second, I felt that through it I managed to usher in a new style for the memoir tradition of Mississippi that I felt proud of, one that took the memoir to a new level.”
Another of Laymon’s books, “Long Division,” won the 2022 NAACP Image Award for fiction and is now the subject of a film project that Laymon is working on in collaboration with former Daily Show host Trevor Noah. He is also working on a musical with Zailon Levingston called “Heavy: An American Musical,” as well as a new television show called “The System,” for which he co-wrote an episode with David Simon. The University Press of Mississippi published a series of interviews with Laymon titled “Conversations with Kiese Laymon” covering the author’s life as a creator, activist and Mississippian.
Laymon founded Jackson State University’s Catherine Coleman Literary Arts, Food and Justice Initiative, which the campus’ Margaret Walker Center operates. The program aims to help young people in Jackson become comfortable with reading and sharing their own writing within their communities. He also co-hosts a podcast called “Reckon True Stories” together with author and public speaker Deesha Philyaw.
“For any up-and-coming writers, the most important piece of advice I can offer is to remember that the greatest writers always revise,” Laymon advised. “Going in repeatedly to revise is a determining factor in how you will do as a writer. It’s OK to get things wrong, and it’s OK to fail because you need to experiment and make discoveries. Anything you did before you can do now, and embracing that is key to the kind of work we writers do.”
Know a Mississippian you believe deserves some public recognition? Nominate them for a potential Person of the Day article at mfp.ms/pod.