T: The New York Times Style Magazine and Boots Riley Present 32 Black Male Writers

In an illustrious feature for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Ayana Mathis (with creative direction from Boots Riley) brings readers face-to-face with several prominent and emerging black male writers, playwrights, and poets, casting a light on Gregory Pardlo, Tyehimba Jess, Ross Gay, Danez Smith, Fred Moten, Yusef Komunyakaa, Major Jackson, Kevin Young, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Jericho Brown, and others. 

“THE IDEA OF a black male resurgence feels like a bit of an illusion,” says the playwright Jacobs-Jenkins. “Really, it feels like people are just suddenly noticing that there are black people in the room.” Most of the writers I spoke with shared some iteration of his sentiment: Black men have been producing rich and varied work for a long time, but folks are paying a lot more attention than they used to. John Edgar Wideman has been published to great acclaim for almost 40 years. Edward P. Jones, the author of two critically adored short story collections, won a Pulitzer for his novel “The Known World” in 2004. Percival Everett has written nearly 30 books since 1983, but wide recognition didn’t come until he published “Erasure,” in 2001, a sharp satire about a failing black writer who becomes the next hot thing when he parodies another character’s book called “We’s Lives in Da Ghetto.” Such recognition typically sparks in that instant when white literary influencers tune the dial to a station that’s been playing for a long, long time. “There’s a dynamic [black literary] conversation that has no beginning and no end,” says the poet Saeed Jones.

If this moment is, at least in part, about heightened awareness of black male writers, it may well vanish when the social climate changes — which it inevitably will. A surge of mainstream attention to blackness and its literature isn’t unprecedented in periods of American crisis. The first strains of the Harlem Renaissance began at the tail end of World War I and gained momentum in the 1920s, as the racial makeup of American cities metamorphosed through the Great Migration. The Harlem of the 1930s became home to a concentration of black writers whose work piqued white interest. In the 1960s and ’70s, the Black Arts Movement erupted during the turbulent years of America’s freedom protests. Black voices received heightened attention then, too.