Nonfiction Portfolio
Praise for Life During Wartime Winner of the Michael Rubin Chapbook Award
Life During Wartime Original Artwork by Dominique Santos
Kimberly Reyes’s Life During Wartime binds lyrical reflection with hard barriers in a bold portrayal of brutal facts. As Reyes navigates the racist and sexist underpinnings of America, she transforms language into the emotions and effects of inequality. Reyes’s prose stirs the reader into recognition.
– Helen Windfell, author of Consensuality: Navigating Feminism, Gender, and Boundaries Towards Loving Relationships
In Life During Wartime Kimberly Reyes poetically explicates the many forces that shape(d) her black girl-to-womanhood. With pop culture and musical references interspersed among essays told in the first and second person, Life During Wartime spans street harassment to consent to misophonia (“the hatred of sound”) to career negotiation. By turns devastating and patiently explanatory, these are deeply private musings, which Reyes effortlessly places in their larger social context through conversational and engrossing writing. In her generous essays the reader becomes privy to the myriad ways in which U.S. American society limits the freedom of the black female body, and what it means to finally find “a room of my own in the middle of the city.”
– Irène Mathieu, MD, author of orogeny and Grand Marronage
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