He earned a BA at Western Kentucky University and an MFA at Rutgers University-Newark. Jones was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up in Lewisville, Texas. The poetry collection was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as awards from Lambda Literary and the Publishing Triangle in 2015. Saeed Jones is the author of Prelude to Bruise, winner of the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry and the 2015 Stonewall Book Award/Barbara Gittings Literature Award. Read “ Blue Dress,” a poem Jones describes writing in How We Fight for Our Lives.

How We Fight for Our Lives is a one-of-a-kind memoir and a book that cements Saeed Jones as an essential writer for our time. Each piece builds into a larger examination of race and queerness, power and vulnerability, love and grief: a portrait of what we all do for one another-and to one another-as we fight to become ourselves.Īn award-winning poet, Jones has developed a style that’s as beautiful as it is powerful-a voice that’s by turns a river, a bruise, and a nightscape set ablaze. Through a series of vignettes that chart a course across the American landscape, Jones draws readers into his boyhood and adolescence-into tumultuous relationships with his family, into passing flings with lovers, friends, and strangers.

Jones tells the story of a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears. Haunted and haunting, How We Fight for Our Lives is a stunning coming-of-age memoir. The ‘I’ it seems doesn’t exist until we are able to say, ‘I am no longer yours.’” We sacrifice the people who dared to raise us. “We sacrifice former versions of ourselves.

“People don’t just happen,” writes Saeed Jones.

Poetry, memory and memoir: from Jones’ poem “ A Memory“:īut history has never stopped me from praying.

The body as a weapon: “If America was going to hate me for being black and gay, then I might as well make a weapon out of myself.” (130).

Love and honesty: “I did exactly what I thought all people who love each other do: I changed the subject I changed myself I erased everything I had just said I erased myself so I could be her son again.” (114).

But it was all I wanted until I had it.” (18)

Desire: “One more good look, that’s all I wanted.

Religion and mythology, between the generations of Jones’ family – Buddhism, Christianity, and Greek myths.

How we fight for our lives