Rasheed Newson Books In Order
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My Government Means to Kill Me | (2022) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Rasheed Newson is a literary fiction author that is best known for his debut novel “My Government Means to Kill Me.”
The author was brought up In Minneapolis, Indiana, and was the firstborn child of three siblings.
From very early on, she had an interest in reading fiction and poetry. Some of her favorite authors during this period were Kurt Vonnegut and Nikki Giovanni.
While he clearly had an interest in writing, it would be many years before he would become a fiction author.
It was while he was in high school that he finally acknowledged that he was a homosexual and set out to become an active one. During the mid-1990s, this was no mean feat and required a lot of courage.
In fact, Rasheed once spend hours lazing around at a coffee shop since the local rumor mill said that gay people frequented the place.
Rasheed would, later on, go to Georgetown University, where he started writing for “The Hoya” the school paper. During his time in DC the capital, he worked for several nonprofits as a communication and media specialist.
Some of the organizations he worked for include the “Coalition for Juvenile Justice.” He also volunteered for at least five years at a foster home that catered to children that were living with AIDs or were HIV positive.
Unlike his homosexuality, writing is something that had always been in Rasheed Newson’s subconscious. Ever since he learned about writing, he found it the easiest way to put words and stories across.
As an eight-year-old, he used to get mad because his parents would not let him stay up late to read novels.
The interesting thing was that rather than going to their bedroom to argue his case, he used to write a letter explaining his reasons for wanting to stay up later. His parents humored him even though they still did not let him stay up late.
In high school, he enjoyed writing and in fact, English was one of his favorite classes. Given that he was terrible at math, he used to barter his English skills with friends so that he could write more.
It was while he was in college that he began competing and pursuing writing as a carer. However, what he wanted to do was pen stories for the movies. In his generation, most people thinking of writing gravitated toward screenwriting.
Once Rasheed Newson graduated from college, he moved to LA, seeking to become a screenwriter. It was in LA that he would join a writers group and meet his writing partner.
In Los Angeles, he found work as a production assistant and then graduated to executive assistant where he spent several years.
With the experience he gained from being an executive assistant, he got a job as an assistant to a showrunner and soon after became the second assistant to the president of a network.
His career as a writer began to flourish when he teamed up with T.J. Brady and they started working on “Lie to Me” the Fox drama as staff writers. Together they have since worked on many TV shows including Narcos, The Chi, and Bel Air.
Over the course of about two years, he penned his debut novel “My Government Means to Kill Me,” a passion project he never expected would catch the eye of a publisher.
However, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret’s Jim McCarthy who was his literary agent saw that the manuscript has potential. It was not long before he had it published in 2022.
As a black queer creative, Rasheed Newson is very proud of the novel that he had been thinking about writing for several years. As a lover of fiction and history, he successfully found an effective way to meld both subjects and themes into one.
Just like many other black people, he often wondered what they would have done had they been alive during the Civil Right Movement era of the 1960s. Would he have marched, or just stayed behind and let others do the heavy lifting?
Applying the same concepts to his being gay and Black, he imagined what it would have been to be alive in New York City at the height of the AIDS pandemic.
Aside from his novel, he has also found other outlets and avenues to meld his queer and Black identity. The biggest arena where he gets to celebrate this is Bel Air which is a show that features an African American family and has LGBTQ characters.
Rasheed Newson’s blockbuster novel “My Government Means to Kill Me” is a riveting and fierce coming-of-age story. The work follows the political and personal awakening of a young gay African American man living in New York City in the 1980s.
Earl Trey was born into a relatively rich family in Indianapolis and as a teenager, he left his authoritative parents and their impossible expectations.
He heads to New York with a few hundred dollars to his name hoping to find a job and start a new life. In the city, he makes friends with several characters that change everything in his life.
There is Bayard Rustin the civil rights leader whom he met at a bathhouse in Harlem, and then there is Fred Trump his landlord who he often gets into clashes with.
He sometimes works at a renegade home hospice as a volunteer taking care of people living with AIDS.
Soon after Dorothy Cotton, a civil rights leader, and Larry Kramer a gay rights activist dare him and he joins a group fighting against discrimination against people with AIDS.
In the midst of all this, Earl tries to search for the best ways of maintaining familial relationships and navigating traumas from the past. But even as there is death all around he never stops searching for the meaning of life.
It is a humorous and vibrant story full of all manner of entanglements that discusses what it is like for a young gay black man to find his identity in the midst of social and political reckoning during the 1980s.
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