March 11, 2025
Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon is the author of the genre-bending novel, Long Division and the essay collection, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. Laymon’s bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the 2018 Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, 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. Laymon is the recipient of 2020-2021 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard. Laymon, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and Oxford Anerican, is at work on several new projects, including the long poem, Good God, the horror comedy, And So On, the children’s book, City Summer, Country Summer and the film Heavy: An American Memoir. He is the founder of “The Catherine Coleman Literary Arts and Justice Initiative,” a program aimed at getting young people and their parents more comfortable reading, writing, revising and sharing. Learn more about Kiese and his work on his website: https://www.kieselaymon.com/.
Launched in 2017, Food Literacy for All is a community-academic partnership course at the University of Michigan supported by the Sustainable Food Systems Initiative, School for Environment & Sustainability, Program in the Environment, and CEW+ Frances and Sydney Lewis Visiting Leaders Fund. From January to April 2025, Food Literacy for All features guest speakers each Tuesday evening (6:30-8 PM EST) to address the challenges and opportunities of diverse food systems. The 2025 course is organized around the theme “Food and Care.” The course is co-facilitated by Dr. Bénédicte Boisseron (the course Faculty Instructor and UM Professor and Chair of Afroamerican & African Studies), Shiloh Maples (the course Community Co-Instructor and an Anishinaabe community organizer, seed keeper, and storyteller), and Sami Maldonado (the Course Coordinator and graduate student in the School for Environment & Sustainability), with support too from Lesli Hoey (Co-Director of the UM Transformative Food Systems Fellowship).
Learn more and register for free as a community member on the Food Literacy for All website. https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/sustainab…
