English Department Skok Distinguished Visiting Writer Kiese Laymon will visit Northeastern to give a reading and discuss his work. Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. In his observant, often hilarious work, Laymon does battle with the personal and the political: race and family, body and shame, poverty and place. His savage humor and clear-eyed perceptiveness have earned him comparisons to Ta-Nehisi Coates, Alice Walker, and Mark Twain. He is the author of the award-winning memoir Heavy, the groundbreaking essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and the genre-defying novel Long Division. Laymon is a best selling author, social critic, and essayist; he is the recipient of a 2022 MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship for "bearing witness to the myriad forms of violence that mark the Black experience in formally inventive fiction and nonfiction."