Saeed Jones

Saeed Jones is a poet and memoirist whose debut memoir How We Fight for Our Lives won the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction in 2019, the same year it was published to widespread critical acclaim. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1985 and raised in Lewisville, Texas, Jones grew up navigating the intersecting pressures of race, sexuality, and grief. His mother, a formidable and complicated presence, is at the emotional center of both his memoir and much of his poetry.

Jones studied at Western Kentucky University, where he discovered his love of poetry and found a community of writers who nurtured his voice. He went on to earn his M.F.A. in creative writing from Rutgers University–Newark. His poetry collection Prelude to Bruise (2014) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, and it announced him as a distinctive voice in American letters — one that fused lyric beauty with the visceral realities of Black queer experience in the American South.

How We Fight for Our Lives is a memoir in essays and vignettes that traces Jones’s coming-of-age as a gay Black man in the South and Midwest, charting the cost of survival in environments that demanded he hide or diminish parts of himself. The book is celebrated for its compression and lyricism — shaped, many reviewers noted, by a poet’s ear — and for its devastating final chapters dealing with grief and loss. It is taught widely in university courses on memoir, LGBTQ literature, and contemporary American writing.

Jones has been the culture and entertainment editor at BuzzFeed News, a co-host of the podcast Read or Dead, and a contributor to numerous publications including The New York Times, GQ, and The Guardian. He continues to write poetry, essays, and cultural criticism, and is regarded as one of the most important writers of his generation.