Robert Jones Jr., a Brooklyn College alumnus, has written a different kind of love story. “The Prophets”– a finalist for the National Book Award–centers around the refuge that two enslaved young gay men find in each other on a plantation in the antebellum American South. It’s “an often lyrical and rebellious love story embedded within a tender call-out to Black readers, reaching across time and form to shake something old, mighty in the blood,”
said The New York Times. Jones took a long and searching route to his acclaimed debut novel. He went back to Brooklyn College at 31, stayed on to earn his MFA in creative writing and began a long-running social justice blog called “Son of Baldwin.” He spent nearly a decade and a half writing a novel from his soul. “Toni Morrison said, ‘If you cannot find the book you wish to read, then you must write it,” Jones tells Joe Tirella on this episode of Book Beat.
Related Links
Acclaim for “The Prophets”
Robert Jones Jr. Is Son of Baldwin, and More (The New York Times)
Son of Baldwin blog
Jones is part of CUNY’s longstanding cultivation of top literary talent
Episode Transcript
Joseph Tirella: With the publication of his critically acclaimed debut novel “The Prophets,” Robert Jones, Jr., a Brooklyn College alumnus, has written a different kind of love story. “The Prophets” centers around the loving relationship between two enslaved homosexual Black men in the antebellum American South. As far as he knows, it’s the first novel to deal with the personal lives of Black gay men attempting to find some semblance of normalcy amidst their tortured existence on a plantation. Jones, who for years has written the social justice blog Son of Baldwin, weaves together a number of disparate narrative threads: The lives of plantation’s other enslaved people, the spirits of their collective African ancestors who address the reader as an otherworldly chorus, and the white slave-owning family who control every aspect of their lives. He even conjures up the tale of King Akusa, a fierce female African warrior with six wives, to create a story-within-a-story in a symphonic novel that wrestles with America’s blood-soaked racist legacy. Like the multi-faceted story he has written, Jones has traveled a long road to get to this point in his life. After more than one attempt, he returned to Brooklyn College at 31 and stayed on to earn a graduate degree in creative writing. It was another decade before he realized his dream of becoming an author. The Prophets is a bold and audacious debut from an exciting new voice in American fiction.
Robert Jones, Jr., welcome to Book Beat and congratulations on the success of your debut novel, “The Prophets,” which has been published to rave reviews. Could you discuss how long it took you to write “The Prophets” and what that process was like for you?
Robert Jones Jr.: Absolutely. It took me from start to finish 14 years. Fourteen years from the moment I put pen to paper, to the moment my editor said we are done with revisions was 14 years. And it started when I was at CUNY.
