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G'Ra Asim is a writer, a musician, and an assistant professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. He has served as writing director at the African American Policy Forum and as graduate teaching fellow in Columbia's Undergraduate Writing Program. His work has appeared in Slate, Salon, Guernica, The Baffler, and The New Republic. When not writing prose or teaching, he sings, plays bass and writes lyrics for NYC DIY pop punk band babygotbacktalk, who were named one of AfroPunk's ""Top 8 Punkest Bands on the Planet Right Now.""
Like any great mixtape, Asim's compilation is the most personalized of gifts. Layered, deeply revealing, it's a rhythmic journey through the indices, subgenres, and touchstones that encapsulate the refinement of an increasingly rare gem--Black singularity. Written with love, erudition, and the utmost respect, Boyz n the Void is a genuine keepsake. --Paul Beatty, author of The Sellout, winner of the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award Boyz n the Void is the Black punk bildungsroman of your dreams: it's as if Bad Brains had written the smartest book in the world, only better. Asim guides us to the borders of American Blackness and beyond in this debut that's so mesmerizingly smart and so unsparingly honest it will literally rewrite the playlist in your heart. --Junot Diaz, author of The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Boyz n the Void is a critical ethnography of growing up Black and punk in the aughts. Asim strikes a balance between total immersion in the scene and the intimacy of a letter sent between brothers. Boyz n the Void manages to be ambitious, scholarly, and cool all at once--a testament to its necessity and authenticity. Boyz n the Void is essential reading for Black weirdos, punks of all ages, and those invested in impeccably rendered American history. --Cyree Jarelle Johnson, author of Slingshot, winner of the 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry In this wise, funny, and heartfelt meditation on the vagaries of post-conventional identity, G'Ra Asim writes that to be a successful Black artist you 'must not only untether yourself from essentialized notions of Blackness but create with such fluency as to move your audience to jettison the same constraints.' Boyz n the Void is many things--an impassioned paean to high-stakes cultural invention, a brutally honest excavation of the twenty-first-century color line, and a work of brotherly love--but it also marks the emergence of an important Black artist. --Chris Lehmann, editor of The New Republic G'Ra Asim's Boyz n the Void is full of dopamine hits and heartbreak. You don't want to stop listening, even when it aches. It becomes part of you. These essays are rigorous and tender and funny all at once, charged with humor that doesn't deflect from difficult honesty so much as it takes you deeper into the maze of truth. Asim is attentive to small acts of intimacy and solidarity and vulnerability--a punk kid parting the curtain of his mushroom haircut, or learning to love the sweat and leather of a mosh pit--even as he dissects and illuminates, with searing, razor-sharp brushstrokes, the daily brutalities and hidden curriculums of structural racism. I'd gladly read anything by 'Ra the Exhorter--for his brilliance, his wit, his heart, and his electric illuminations of those forces of love and rebellion that might be able to remake our broken world. --Leslie Jamison, New York Times best-selling author of The Empathy Exams There are just some voices that stop you cold; as resonances of some familiar brilliance but also of something so original, so compelling that you have no choice but to take notice. G'Ra Asim is one of those voices, and his book Boyz n the Void: a mixtape to my brother is the literary salve that we didn't know that we all needed. --Mark Anthony Neal, author of Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities
