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From an exhilarating new voice, a breathtaking memoir about gay desire, Blackness, and growing up.

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.

A lyrical narrative reminiscent of Saeed Jones’s How We Fight for Our Lives and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, 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.

Advance Praise:

“Lush and luscious are not the same, though classic literature relies on both. Darius Stewart stylistically explores the lushness of growing in a luscious south. This book is a mammoth creation and is actually a literal moving monument to fear and lovely obsession with our bodies' memories. Just unbelievably rich art right here.”—Kiese Laymon, MacArthur “Genius” Fellow and author of Heavy: An American Memoir 

“Darius Stewart has reimagined the form of the American memoir as a garland of poetry of hard-won insights. Be Not Afraid of My Body is a gift, an assembly of grace, wit, candor, outrage, bewilderment, charm, and wisdom of stunning beauty.”—John D’Agata, author of About a Mountain and Halls of Fame

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

“Ravishing and compelling, Be Not Afraid of My Body is a memoir that speaks of troubled acceptance and spiritual and physical emergence.” —Meg Nola, Foreword Reviews

“Darius Stewart’s Be Not Afraid of my Body is a heart-wrenching exploration of sexuality—how it’s discovered, how it’s exploited, how it blossoms. Tennessee is the background to so many of the essays here, and it comes alive with details of streets and playgrounds and neighbors. These essays echo across the collection, building upon each other. Stewart’s is a voice we’ve been waiting for.” —Sarah Blake, author of Naamah and Clean Air 

“I’ve known Darius for 20 years, and I’ve been a huge, freak-level fan of his writing for just as long. Be Not Afraid of My Body is the brilliant, beautiful book he was always going to write. It is, by turns, funny, sexy, sad, tender, poignant, brutal and heartbreaking, but always vivid, always alive—a major literary event that will justly draw comparisons to Baldwin and Styron. Do yourself a favor, and don’t wait to read it.” —Catherine Baab-Muguira, author of Poe for Your Problems: Uncommon Advice from History's Least Likely Self-Help Guru 

“Reading the marvelous (it is indeed a marvel!) Be Not Afraid of My Body incited a very particular need in me: to lovingly strike Darius Stewart because what else is there to do when his just-don’t-make-no-damn-sense brilliance leaves you ecstatically bewildered? It is a common practice in Black churches: the need to lovingly strike because, say, a member of the choir’s voice has inched you closer to the divine. Within these pages is another voice, a literary one, that inches us ever closer to the divine.” —DK Nnuro, author of What Napoleon Could Not Do

“There is so much majesty in this slim, haunting collection by Darius Stewart. In essays alive with supermoons and seam-stitched skies, delirium tremens and strobe-lit bodies, Stewart spins a taut and tender story of coming of age as a Black gay man in America. I read this book in one breathless setting, often heart-choked and always enrapt.” —Sarah Viren, author of To Name the Bigger Lie and Mine

“Reading Darius Stewart’s Be Not Afraid of my Body: A Lyrical Memoir felt like reading an epic poem. Not in the way people use ‘poetic’ to mean ‘very good writing’ (which both fundamentally misunderstands poetry and condescends to prose), but in the way the stakes felt everywhere apparent, the way the good associative leaping between sections felt charged, synapses across which forces of spirit and time might fire and illuminate. Stewart is a charming, searching, and unflinching interlocutor, whether he’s speaking to/through the book’s presiding influence, Essex Hemphill, or regaling the reader with messy hookups and botched attempts to snort coke through a cigarette. Calling it artful belies just how readable, dazzlingly propulsive this book is. I already can’t wait to read it again.” —Kaveh Akbar, author of Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“Be Not Afraid of My Body is no love letter, but a powerful and empowering message to love—and to the body, to family, to history, to language, and to the endless and essential fight for the self; in lyric prose and fearless voice, Stewart brilliantly confronts, defies, celebrates, and pays homage to our human limitations and limitlessness.” —Susan Steinberg, author of Machine and Spectacle

“Darius Stewart’s Be Not Afraid of My Body is a memoir of haunting beauty that captures, in language bone-clean and sure, the complexities of being Black, gay, and southern in America. And like all ghosts I know, it has kept me up at night. Never have I met on the page such steadfast tenderness, such grace for one's past transgressions, such beauty in the face of heartache and grief. Yes, this memoir is drenched in grief, as Stewart revisits, in uncompromising language, the death of his innocence, the death of close friendships, the death of loved ones both intimate and dear. And still, there's hope here, standing like a sentinel between the reader and the book’s murkier depths, always pointing us towards the brighter tomorrow.” —Alonzo Vereen, author of Historically Black: American Icons Who Attended HBCUs