Saeed Jones's How We Fight for Our Lives Wins 2019 Kirkus Prize

Among the winners of this year's Kirkus Prize is Saeed Jones for his memoir How We Fight for Our Lives. The award comes with a generous honorarium of $50,000. More about Jones's memoir from Kirkus Review:

A coming-of-age memoir marks the emergence of a major literary voice.

A prizewinning poet, Jones (Prelude to Bruise, 2014) tends less toward flights of poetic fancy and more toward understated, matter-of-fact prose, all the more powerful because the style never distracts from the weight of the story: the sexual awakening and struggle for identity of a young black man raised in Texas by a single mother, a Buddhist, who herself was the daughter of an evangelical Christian. He and his mother were both damned to hell, according to his grandmother, who nonetheless loved both of them. There is a lot of subtlety in these familial relations: the son not willing to recognize the implications of his loving mother’s heart condition, the mother struggling with her son’s sexuality. The “fight” in the title is partly about the fight with society at large, but it is mainly about the fight within the author himself.

Congrats to Jones! Read on at Kirkus Review.