Conversation with Darius Stewart

Belt talks to Darius Stewart, author of Be Not Afraid of My Body

You use several writerly tools in this book that create an experience of closeness for the reader. One is in the first chapter, where you use the second person and tell the reader, "Imagine you are a young blackboy in Knoxville, Tennessee," before delving into the experience you're conjuring for them. Tell me about this choice. 

I do use several writerly tools throughout Be Not Afraid of My Body to create a sense of intimacy and proximity between the reader and the text. Lyrical language, fragmentation, repetition, nonlinear chronology, and shifting points of view are all part of how I construct a narrative that reflects how memory actually works—especially memory shaped by trauma, desire, and queer Black embodiment. These choices aren’t meant to be ornamental; they’re structural. They allow me to disrupt the conventions of memoir and let the emotional truth dictate the form. I want the reader to feel as if they’re not just reading about something, but are moving inside it—through the textures of memory, fantasy, shame, and longing alongside me.

Using the second person in that opening chapter—“Get Ghost”—wasn’t just a stylistic decision; it was also a political one. When I say that, I mean the choice to use you wasn’t made simply because it sounds different or draws attention to craft. It was a deliberate move to challenge how readers engage with Black/queer narratives and to reflect the psychological realities of the self I’m writing from.

Politically, it disrupts the traditional memoir dynamic where the narrator says I and the reader stays safely outside as you. Instead, using the second-person address implicates the reader. If you are asked to imagine yourself as a young Black boy being stalked by a white man, you're not allowed to simply observe trauma at a distance—you’re made to feel it in your own body. That shift demands empathy, but more than that, it challenges who is usually afforded safety, invisibility, or complexity in literature. 

The second person also allowed me to speak to both myself and the reader at once. It becomes a way to revisit a younger version of myself who didn’t yet have the language or clarity to name what was happening. It lets me hold that younger self close while also turning the mirror toward the reader. In a way, I’m saying: This happened to me, but it doesn’t belong only to me. That duality—of claiming my story while inviting others into it—felt necessary for the kind of vulnerability and recognition I wanted the book to carry.

So yes, the second person serves a formal function, but it’s also about power: reclaiming my voice, rejecting voyeurism, and insisting on closeness—even when it’s uncomfortable.

To anyone reading Be Not Afraid, it will be clear—in the lyricism and form choices —that you're a poet. Why did this book have to exist in prose instead of poetry? How did the text communicate to you what it needed to be?

I love this question because, while the lyricism and formal choices in Be Not Afraid of My Body may signal my background as a poet, I knew early on that this book had to be written in prose. The story demanded it. I hadn’t initially considered writing a memoir—at least not consciously—because I hadn’t yet realized how flexible the form could be. What I knew was that I needed space to explore what I was calling “the events of 2015,” a cluster of personal crises that felt too complex for compression. So, I instinctively turned to the essay, which was the first genre I had ever written in. It felt familiar, open-ended, and associative enough to hold the contradictions I knew I would discover once I began to trace not only what happened, but how it happened—and most importantly, why.

Still, even as I wrote in prose, I didn’t abandon the poet in me. The language of the book is shaped by poetic tools: rhythm, sonic pattern, recursive imagery, an attention to the sentence as a unit of breath. What began as a series of essays gradually revealed itself as a memoir—not because I imposed a narrative arc, but because the language kept circling back, insisting on accumulation and emotional architecture. The lyricism helped me write into what didn’t yet have narrative clarity. And the prose gave me the duration and flexibility to let that lyricism stretch—across time, across genre, across modes of knowing.

This wasn’t a choice between poetry and narrative. It was a conversation between them. The book needed structure, but it also needed to be ruptured. It needed form, but also permission to veer. Developing Be Not Afraid of My Body as a lyrical memoir meant using poetic devices not just for atmosphere, but for logic. It allowed me to prioritize the emotional truth over traditional chronology, to let fragmentation and return do the work of remembering. That’s where the voice emerged—in the freedom to think, feel, grieve, and reach through language that wasn’t beholden to inherited rules of what memoir is supposed to look like.

Frequently in this memoir, you turn to the hypothetical or imagined and/or turn your "I" narrator into a "he," distancing him from yourself. In doing so, you create opacity between the literal narrative and the fears, desires, and memories that live in the narrator's head. Why?

Yes—you’re right to point out how I often shift from the “I” to “he,” or turn toward the imagined and hypothetical, as a way of creating distance between myself and the narrative self. That move isn’t about obscuring the truth, but about making room for the complexities of memory, fear, and desire—and how those forces shape our perception of reality. Sometimes the only way to tell the truth is through a little disidentification: to re-encounter certain events without having to fully re-inhabit them. That’s part of what opacity offered me—not concealment, but a form of ethical and emotional clarity.

I’ve discussed how this works in “Get Ghost,” but it’s just as central in sections like “Love, Like in the Movies” and “How to Reconcile.” There, the turn toward hypotheticals and imagined scenarios allows me to explore alternative realities—the what-ifs and inner negotiations that often accompany trauma, desire, and loss. These aren’t digressions from the real—they are extensions of it. They illustrate how the narrator’s internal world is shaped not just by what happened, but by what could have happened, what was feared, withheld, or longed for.

These imagined sequences are essential to understanding how the self makes meaning. They map the ongoing dialogue between lived experience and the emotional logic that influences how we remember. The opacity they produce isn’t a barrier—it’s a lens that reveals the intricate workings of a mind wrestling with tough truths and desires that refuse easy articulation.

What was the process of revising and editing this book like?

The revision and editing process for Be Not Afraid of My Body was layered, messy, and—in many ways—shaped by community. Most of the book was drafted while I was in the Nonfiction Writing Program at Iowa, working toward my MFA. The early versions were deeply influenced by the workshop space—by the questions my peers and professors asked, the craft tools they offered, and the permission they gave me to explore prose even as a poet. But working with Kiese Laymon during my first year in the program was especially pivotal. He pushed me to write with more rigor, more honesty, more intentionality. Kiese taught me not just how to revise, but how to interrogate my own instincts: Why this image? Why this silence? Who are you protecting? That kind of questioning taught me to approach the page with precision and purpose.

Still, it wasn’t until about a year after graduating that I realized I needed to take the manuscript seriously as a publishable book. I literally jumped out of bed at four in the morning with this sense of urgency. I started digging through more than a decade’s worth of discarded material—failed prose poems, fragments of lyric essays, pages that hadn’t worked in their original forms but still held emotional weight. Because my writing often circled the same obsessions—desire, memory, illness, loss—many of those pieces found a natural home in the manuscript. But it wasn’t as simple as copying and pasting. I had to do real surgery—deep revision—to integrate those fragments into the larger whole. The goal wasn’t just to make the book longer, but to give it more coherence, more depth.

Once I signed with my agent, Matt McGowan, we shaped the manuscript further. And after Belt acquired the book, I worked closely with my editor, Michael Jauchen, on developmental edits that really helped smooth the book’s rough edges. That process was intense. I had to confront a lot of craft questions I’d been circling since grad school: how to balance the poetic and the prosaic, how to build scenes, how to pace a narrative when I was used to the compression of poetry. Thankfully, mentors like John D’Agata and other professors in the program had already planted the seeds for those exact concerns.

Ultimately, I came to understand that writing prose didn’t mean abandoning poetry—it meant expanding the container. It meant letting both modes inform and challenge each other. That’s what the revision process became for me: a sustained act of listening, of returning to the page again and again, with rigor but also a lot of patience.

This book has been honored by the ALA Stonewall Award. What does that mean to you?

I suppose to answer this question, I'll share my acceptance from the ceremony:

I am deeply grateful to the Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award Committee for selecting Be Not Afraid of My Body as an Honor Book. To be recognized by a committee that so passionately uplifts queer lives, queer literature, and the forms they insist on taking—this means more than I can fully express.

I also want to thank the Rainbow Round Table of the American Library Association. Through the Stonewall Book Awards, you hold a singular place in literary history—affirming not just the legitimacy, but the dignity, imagination, and endurance of LGBTQIA+ writers. I am humbled and proud to join the lineage of this award.

To the librarians, archivists, and curators of community who make space on the shelves and in the margins for voices like mine—thank you. Libraries have long been sanctuaries for me. As a Black queer boy growing up in East Tennessee, deep in the closet, I found in books the language I didn’t yet have for myself. I’m standing here because someone thought to catalog E. Lynn Harris. James Earl Hardy. But especially because someone believed Ceremonies by Essex Hemphill belonged on a shelf, where it could find a boy like me. Essex has long inspired my writing and is reflected in the pages of this book.

I want to thank my agent, Matt McGowan, who championed Be Not Afraid of My Body from the very beginning. Even in the face of numerous rejections from the Big Five, he never once asked me to revise the book to suit someone else's idea of “marketable” literature. He never asked me to tame its voice, or cut the parts that were strange, hybrid, wounded, horny, haunted. Instead, we found a worthy home thanks to Anne Trubek at Belt Publishing. Anne welcomed this book with a kind of generosity and trust that is rare in publishing. She and my editor, Michael Jauchen, met the work exactly as it was and set about amplifying it with clarity and care. They believed this story deserved to be told, and told loudly.

This recognition tells me that our stories—however fractured, unpretty, or disobedient—are essential. There is, and must always be, room in the canon for lyrical Black gay coming-of-age narratives, and for the stories that live at the intersections of race, queerness, illness, and desire—stories that ask what it means to be seen and unseen at once. This is the book I wrote—for me, and for us. Thank you for honoring that effort.