This year, Richmond Public Library is pleased to welcome acclaimed authors Kiese Laymon and Mira Jacob in conversation with one another.  Audience Q&A will follow.

Kiese Laymon’s bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in nonfiction, the 2018 Christopher Isherwood 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.  When Laymon was a contributing editor at Gawker, he wrote an essay called “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America,” which evolved into a collection of essays on race, violence, celebrity, family, and creativity.  This collection, originally published under the same name in 2013, was expanded and reissued in 2020.

Laymon is a graduate of Oberlin College and holds an MFA in creative writing from Indiana University.  He is currently a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, ESPN The Magazine, Colorlines, NPR, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Ebony, Guernica, The Oxford American, Lit Hub, and many others.  He founded the Catherine Coleman Initiative for the Arts and Social Justice, a program aimed at getting Mississippi kids and their parents more comfortable reading, writing, revising, and sharing. 

Mira Jacob is a novelist, memoirist, illustrator, and cultural critic.  Born in New Mexico to parents who emigrated from India, she uses her dual-culture background to navigate the ebb and flow of politics and modern culture.  Her first novel, The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, was critically acclaimed, short-listed for India’s Tata First Literature Award and longlisted for the Brooklyn Literary Eagles Prize.

In 2015, Jacob illustrated a graphic article for BuzzFeed entitled “37 Difficult Questions From My Mixed-Race Son,” which quickly went viral.  Her stunning graphic memoir, Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations, expands upon the delicate and nuanced conversations about race and politics she has with her son.  Good Talk was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award, and named a New York Times Notable Book, as well as a best book of the year by Time, Esquire, Publisher’s Weekly, Library Journal.  It is currently in development as a television series with Film 44.  Jacob is currently the visiting professor at the MFA Creative Writing program at The New School and is a founding faculty member of the MFA Program at Randolph College.  She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, documentary filmmaker Jed Rothstein, and their son.

Read Up, Richmond challenges people to read differently, to read outside one’s own lived experience to develop an understanding of the world. This program is an opportunity for people from different walks of life to come together in the library to learn together, to enter into a conversation with the larger community, to share the same space, making Richmond a more connected, more civil place. This program is made possible through the generous support of the Richmond Public Library Foundation and the Friends of the Richmond Public Library.