Be Not Afraid of My Body: A Lyrical Memoir

A poet’s “dazzlingly propulsive” memoir of growing up Black and gay in Knoxville, Tennessee (Kaveh Akbar, New York Times–bestselling author of Martyr!).

Darius Stewart spent his childhood in the Lonsdale projects of Knoxville, where he grew up navigating school, friendship, and his own family life in a context that often felt perilous. As we learn about his life in Tennessee—and eventually in Texas and Iowa, where he studies to become a poet—he details the obstacles to his most crucial desires: hiding his earliest attraction to boys in his neighborhood, predatory stalkers, doomed affairs, his struggles with alcohol addiction, and his eventual diagnosis with HIV. Through a mix of straightforward memoir, brilliantly surreal reveries, and moments of startling imagery and insight, Stewart’s explorations of love, illness, chemical dependency, desire, family, joy, shame, loneliness, and beauty coalesce into a wrenching, musical whole. Be Not Afraid of My Body stands as a compelling testament to growing up Black and gay in America, and to the drive in all of us to collect the fragments of our own experience and transform them into a story that does justice to all the multitudes we contain.

“A memorable portrait of Black gay life, from poverty and adversity to accomplishment and poetry.” —Kirkus Reviews

“A mammoth creation . . . Just unbelievably rich art right here.” —Kiese Laymon, New York Times–bestselling author of Heavy