Voice and Vulnerability in the Transformative Classroom

Wednesday, November 9 @ 4-5 pm

Registration required: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/voice-and-vulnerability-in-the-transformative-classroom-tickets-428062244697

Please join Transformative Learning in the Humanities (TLH) for an interactive workshop and discussion with award-winning author and educator, Kiese Laymon. Laymon will share how to help students find their voices as writers and thinkers. He will discuss the role of the transgressive within personal narrative and memoir, exploring the value of vulnerability in transformative work in the classroom. After reading a brief excerpt from his writing to open the discussion, Laymon will be in conversation with TLH Faculty Co-Directors Shelly Eversley (Baruch College) and Matt Brim (College of Staten Island), covering topics such as Black studies, Queer studies, and memoir. There will be ample time for open Q&A at the end of the hour. All CUNY faculty, students, and staff are welcome to join.

Accessibility: ASL interpretation and live CART transcription will be provided.

Speaker Bio:
Kiese Laymon is a subject matter expert on race, police violence, writing, and teaching in higher education, and a public advocate for equity and justice. Laymon is a well-known leader and public figure, a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi who has been compared to Ta-Nehisi Coates, Alice Walker, and Mark Twain. He is the author of a new edition of the groundbreaking essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, as well as the award-winning memoir Heavy and the genre-defying novel Long Division. He received the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in October, 2022.

Laymon’s IndieBound bestselling Heavy: An American Memoir won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the 2018 Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, 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. A personal narrative that illuminates national failures, Heavy is defiant yet vulnerable—an insightful, often comical exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, and family. In a starred review, Kirkus wrote, “Laymon skillfully couches his provocative subject matter in language that is pyrotechnic and unmistakably his own…. A dynamic memoir that is unsettling in all the best ways.” Heavy was named a best book of 2018 by The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, NPR, Broadly, Buzzfeed, The Washington Post, and Entertainment Weekly. The audiobook, read by the author, was named the Audible 2018 Audiobook of the Year.

Laymon is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, ESPN The Magazine, NPR, Colorlines, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Ebony, Guernica, The Oxford American, Lit Hub, Gawker, and many other venues. He is a series editor, along with Marie Mutsuki Mockett, of Great Circle Books, an imprint of nonfiction books published by UNC and helmed by Cate Hodorowicz that seeks to merge the human experience with our relationship to place, aimed particularly at those interested in urgent and previously unvoiced cultural conversations that offer new ways to see and understand a world in a constant state of flux.

A member of Black Artists for Freedom, he was named to the Ebony Magazine Power 100 in 2015 and selected as a member of the Root 100 in 2013 and 2014. He is a graduate of Oberlin College and holds an MFA in creative writing from Indiana University. He founded the Catherine Coleman Initiative for the Arts and Social Justice, a program that helps Mississippi kids and their parents become more comfortable reading, writing, revising and sharing.