About The Author: L. Michael Gipson
L. Michael Gipson is the descendant of urban and country griots, the progeny of those who shared complex stories decades old, pregnant with laughter to suppress the leakage of ancient tears. He is the survivor of a childhood rich with the human drama and frailties, the victor over poverty, molestation, family abandonment, parental alcoholism, adolescent sex work, absent fathers, dismissive stepfathers, and dangerously homophobic streets. He is a son, a brother, an uncle, a nephew, a cousin, and a beloved grandchild. He is a Black man, a gay man, a man of size, a youth advocate, a public health strategist, a music critic, a lifestyle commentator, a radio personality, and an arts nerd whose laugh can be heard several walls deep. More than all of these things, he is a creative being who’s privileged words as his primary mode of expression and storytelling as his weapon of battle and survival. As a writer and a man, he is what Red Dirt Biz is all about.
From The Publisher: Tim'm T. West
As a publisher who has since 2003 principally focused on publishing my own products through Red Dirt Publishing, I'm honored and proud to have L. Michael Gipson's Collisions: A Collection of Intersections as the first of many works to come that are not my own. Collisions describes a collective of experiences without script, the unspoken interiors, and of the truth that lies in between the known and expected in the world of Black gay and bisexual men and boys.
L. Michael's short stories offer beautifully complicated characters whose lives capture both the particularity black gay experience and universal human experience. The stories in Collisions are brilliant for the multitude ways they tap into the range of emotions that define the tensions between culture, relationships, sex, politics, and spirituality. If the stories are easy to read it is because they tap into the emotions of the reader seeking an empathetic self-resolution through the journey of his characters. These are men you love to hate and hate to love; they are fragile and strong, naïve and conscious, victims and heroes. If Collisions is a challenging read, it is because the collection offers few happy resolutions, just questions at the crux of who we are as human beings trying to make sense of a society where identities are both necessary and restrictive. If you are one who thinks critically about who you are and your place in the world, you will see yourself in these stories.
More specifically, in a society where black gay identity is all too often depicted through its more extreme representations-- either Down Low hypermasculine men OR objectifying caricatures of effeminate men-- L. Michael offers identities at the intersection of class, gender, sexual orientation, and spirituality that speak to as wide a range of experiences as I have encountered in black gay literature. L. Michael has been honing this collection for more than a decade, a testament to the patient critical lens needed to offer a collection of shorts that is not just unique in characterization and experience, but grounded in some very critical and philosophical questions about what it means to be black, gay, American, human. If those on the margins of society offer the best lens through which to examine an America at the crossroads, then Collisions offers as real a depiction of people "making do" with a range identities in conflict. Collisions is a work about identity in flux and that will change the way readers see themselves. As reader of literature, it satisfied my desire to encounter a range of stories not bound by the demands of major publishing companies whose products are dictated by quantity of books sold, not quality of stories written. There are stories here I have been hungry for. I imagine that L. Michael Gipson's debut will have a lot to offer both fans of literature as well as scholars looking for creative ways to think critically about the intersections of identity.
