In Conversation: On Antiman: A Hybrid Memoir & Things I Have Withheld: Essays

Jamaican poet, essayist, and novelist Kei Miller, who is also a professor at the University of Miami, is the winner of the Forward poetry prize for The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion. His collections also include Kingdom of Empty Bellies, There Is An Anger That Moves and A Light Song of Light. He is also author of The Last Warner Woman: A Novel, The Same Earth, and Augustown: A Novel, which was a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award and won the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Prix Les Afriques, and the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde. Things I Have Withheld: Essays (Grove Press) is a collection of 14 interconnected works that blend memoir and literary commentary to explore the silences that exist in our conversations about race, sex, and gender, from a Black, male, queer perspective. Miller examines the experience of discrimination through this silence and what it means to breach it. Through letters to James Baldwin, encounters at Soca and Carnival, family secrets, love affairs, questions of aesthetics, and more, Miller powerfully and imaginatively recounts everyday acts of racism and prejudice. Publishers Weekly stated that “Miller vividly depicts the ways colonialism, racism, homophobia, and privilege have shaped his life ... Sharp as blades, [his] words cut to the core.”

Rajiv Mohabir is the author of The Cowherd’s Son: Poems and The Taxidermist’s Cut, and the translator of I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara. Antiman: A Hybrid Memoir (Restless Books), is a genre-blending work that navigates the issues of race, sexuality, and cultural heritage that have shaped his experiences as an Indo-Guyanese queer poet and immigrant to the U.S. Growing up in Florida, Mohabir was fascinated by his family’s abandoned Hindu history and the legacy of his ancestors, who were indentured laborers on British sugarcane plantations. After learning his family stories from his grandmother, Aji, Mohabir lives for a year on the banks of the Ganges, perfecting his Hindi and Bhojpuri and tracing the lineage of Aji’s music. Back in Florida, Confederate flags, Islamophobia, and his father’s disapproval push him to New York, where he finds like-minded brown activists and a queer nightlife scene. Then his cousin outs him as an “antiman” – a Caribbean slur for men who love men – and his father and aunts disown him. In Antiman, Mohabir speaks about embracing his identity as a poet and his status as an antiman, and forging a new way of being entirely his own. The Los Angeles Review of Books said the book “weaves together stories, prayer lyrics, journal entries, dictionary definitions, and musical chords to create his kaleidoscopic, genre-defying memoir.”