The Advocate Profiles BuzzFeed Executive Editor and Poet Saeed Jones

For its "40 Under 40" series, The Advocate profiles poet and Buzzfeed Executive Editor of Culture Saeed Jones. Jones is an advocate for writers of color and for LGBT writers; in this article, he stresses the interconnectedness of all literary communities, explaining "Police brutality is an LGBT issue. The gender wage gap that is impacting queer women, that is an LGBT issue. Immigration is an LGBT issue." From the beginning:

It took Saeed Jones, the executive editor of culture at BuzzFeed, over a month to write “Self-Portrait Of The Artist As Ungrateful Black Writer.” This wasn’t due to writer's block or a lengthy word count. The game-changing article, published in April of this year, highlighted how racial disparities in the publishing industry, which according to a Publisher’s Weekly report is 89 percent white, limit opportunities for writers of color. Jones, a black gay writer and Pushcart Prize-winning poet, feared his livelihood could be at stake.

In the essay, the MFA graduate of Rutgers University recounts the recent experience of an “exclusive literary party I once dreamed of attending, but never thought I would actually be invited to.” But the dream quickly dissolved into a nightmare of microaggressions. He ran into a colleague, who touched his hair without his permission. Another poet, who is black and gay, revealed that he’d been nervous that the publication dates of their books had been so close to each other, as they would be compared “in both flattering and troubling ways.”

“Racism doesn’t vanish the moment we set foot into the ivory towers and glittering soirees of the literati,” Jones declared, while citing mastheads full of white male editors, a watermelon joke made at last year’s National Book Awards, and his own infuriating feeling of being “intensely, almost exhaustingly grateful to just be there.”

“I was terrified to publish it,” Jones tells The Advocate. “I felt often when writers speak up — you certainly see this happen to women [and] LGBT people — you become known as the whiny, angry person. And slowly but surely, the opportunities go away, because people go, ‘There’s that writer, that black writer who’s just angry about race all the time.’ I’ve seen that happen. I was very nervous.”

Continue at The Advocate.