Gazebo Gazette
What if everyone in Pass Christian read the same book and then joined together to talk about it? That is the idea behind One Book, One Pass. The 2023 selected author is Kiese Laymon and the book selection is Heavy: An American Memoir.
Over the next several months, the community is encouraged to read the book and engage in book discussions, panel discussions, and other programs that will culminate in the Author Presentation by Laymon on Thursday, November 2nd at 6:30pm at the Randolph Center in Pass Christian (315 Clark Avenue).
Kiese Laymon is a southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. He is the Libbie Shearn Moody Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rice University. Laymon is the author of Long Division, which won the 2022 NAACP Image Award for fiction, and the essay collection, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, named a notable book of 2021 by the New York Times critics.
The 2023 One Book One Pass selection is the author’s bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, which won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Barnes and Noble Discovery Award, 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.
The audiobook, read by the author, was named the Audible 2018 Audiobook of the Year.
Professor Laymon is the recipient of 2020-2021 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard.. He is the founder of “The Catherine Coleman Literary Arts and Justice Initiative,” a program based out of the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University, aimed at aiding young people in Jackson get more comfortable reading, writing, revising and sharing on their own terms and in their own communities. Kiese Laymon was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.
Copies of Heavy: An American Memoir are available for check out at the Pass Christian Library or for purchase at Pass Christian Books. Please call the library (228-452-4596) or email passchristianlibrary@gmail.com if you have any questions or need further information.
You can follow the One Book One Pass Program on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100067992191047).
