The Center for Fiction Presents Kiese Laymon on City Summer, Country Summer with Joseph Earl Thomas

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Monday, 7:00 pm EDT - 8:15 pm EDT March 31, 2025

The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed

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Join us in welcoming one of the most innovative voices in contemporary publishing, Kiese Laymon, to celebrate the release of his lyrical picture book, City Summer, Country Summer.

Laymon’s story follows three Black boys as they visit family in Mississippi. Given the space to explore and grow by Grandmama and Mama Lara, they forge meaningful bonds, navigating their differences and the unspoken things between them. In collaboration with illustrator Ashley Franklin, Laymon has crafted an illuminating and heartfelt book about a transformative summer trip and the life-changing friendships that result from it.

Joseph Earl Thomas, our 2024 First Novel Prize winner for God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, will join Laymon to discuss writing across genres, the spiritual dimensions of his craft, and the work it takes to break new ground in representation. A book signing will follow the event.

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Featuring

  • Kiese Laymon, Writer, 2022 MacArthur Fellow, Houston, TX

    Kiese Laymon

    Kiese Laymon

    Kiese Laymon is a Black Southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. He is the author of the novel Long Division, the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and the award winning Heavy: An American Memoir. Laymon, named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2022, is the Moody Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rice University. Visit him online at KieseLaymon.com.


    Photo Credit: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

  • Joseph-Thomas_Marcus-Jackson-Large

    Joseph Earl Thomas

    Joseph Earl Thomas

    Joseph Earl Thomas is a writer from Frankford whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in VQR, N+1, Gulf Coast, The Offing, and the Kenyon Review. He has an MFA in prose from The University of Notre Dame and is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania. An excerpt of his memoir, Sink, won the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize and he has received fellowships from Fulbright, VONA, Tin House, and Bread Loaf. God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, is his debut novel. He is writing a collection of stories, Leviathan Beach, among other oddities.


    Photo Credit: Marcus Jackson

Featured Book

  1. . 
    City-Summer-Country-Summer_Cover-scaled

    City Summer, Country Summer

    By Kiese Laymon

    Published by Kokila/PRH

    PURCHASE

    On the ground of that garden, covered in vegetables and dirt, coated in laughter, I want to say that the Mississippi and New York in our Black boy bodies were indistinguishable.

    Three Black boys spend one special summer exploring the Mississippi woods and woulds and coulds of sharing the kind of freeing friendship that is love.

    Watched over and given space to discover by Grandmama and Mama Lara, New York, Country, and little C find camaraderie in their contrasts and all the unspoken things between them while playing games of marco polo in the thick garden and sledding on cardboard by the underpass.

    With text brimming with love by award-winning author Kiese Laymon and deeply evocative illustrations by Ashley Franklin, City Summer, Country Summer illuminates the tenuous and tender bonds of friendship Black boys forge with one another.

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