Contemporary Authors

• Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2008
• Racial Theories in Context Cognella (San Diego, CA), 2010
• An End to All Things ( short stories) Atticus Books (Kensington, MD), 2012
• The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage Counterpoint Press (Berkeley, CA), 2017
• Black Men, Black Feminism: Lucifer's Nocturne Palgrave Pivot (New York, NY), 2018

1. Black men, black feminism : lucifer's nocturne LCCN 2018931893 Type of material Book Personal name Sexton, Jared. Main title Black men, black feminism : lucifer's nocturne / Jared Sexton. Published/Produced New York, NY : Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2018. Projected pub date 1803 Description pages cm ISBN 9783319741253 Library of Congress Holdings Information not available. 2. The people are going to rise like the waters upon your shore : a story of American rage LCCN 2017015327 Type of material Book Personal name Sexton, Jared, author. Main title The people are going to rise like the waters upon your shore : a story of American rage / Jared Yates Sexton. Published/Produced Berkeley, CA : Counterpoint Press, [2017] Projected pub date 1709 Description pages cm ISBN 9781619029569 Library of Congress Holdings Information not available. 3. An end to all things LCCN 2012946578 Type of material Book Personal name Sexton, Jared. Uniform title Short stories. Selections Main title An end to all things / Jared Yates Sexton. Published/Produced [Kensington, MD] : Atticus Books, [2012] Description 223 pages ; 21 cm ISBN 9780984040513 (pbk.) 098404051X (pbk.) Shelf Location FLS2013 018756 CALL NUMBER PS3619.E9835 A6 2012 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS1) 4. Amalgamation schemes : antiblackness and the critique of multiracialism LCCN 2008008574 Type of material Book Personal name Sexton, Jared. Main title Amalgamation schemes : antiblackness and the critique of multiracialism / Jared Sexton. Published/Created Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, c2008. Description 345 p. ; 24 cm. ISBN 9780816651047 (hc : alk. paper) 0816651043 (hc : alk. paper) 9780816651054 (pb : alk. paper) 0816651051 (pb : alk. paper) Links Table of contents only http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0812/2008008574.html Shelf Location FLM2014 052604 CALL NUMBER E184.A1 S563 2008 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM1) Shelf Location FLM2014 047880 CALL NUMBER E184.A1 S563 2008 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM1) 5. Racial theories in context LCCN 2012285832 Type of material Book Main title Racial theories in context / edited by Professor Jared Sexton. Edition 2nd ed. Published/Created San Diego, CA : Cognella, 2010, c2011. Description 216 p. ; 26 cm. ISBN 9781609270568 1609270568 Shelf Location FLM2014 003459 CALL NUMBER HT1521 .R313 2011 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM1)

• Jared Yates Sexton Website - https://www.jysexton.com/about/

  Jared Yates Sexton is a writer, academic, and political correspondent whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, Salon, and literary journals around the world. He's a regular guest on television, radio, and podcasts, and the author of three collections of short fiction and the forthcoming political book The People Are Going To Rise Like The Waters Upon Your Shore from Counterpoint Press. Currently he serves as an Associate Professor of Creative Writing in the Department of Writing & Linguistics at Georgia Southern University.

• Creative Sweet - https://southerncreativesweet.wordpress.com/faculty/

  Creative Writing Faculty
  Jared Yates Sexton, Assistant Professor
  Courses: Screenwriting, Fiction Writing, Creative Writing
  downloadJared Yates Sexton is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Georgia Southern University. He also serves as Managing Editor of BULL, a national literary magazine that focuses on issues of modern masculinity. His writing has appeared in publications around the world like The Southern Humanities Review, The Emerson Review, NANO Fiction, PANK, Hobart, among other venues. He has been nominated for a handful of Pushcart Awards, The Million Writer’s Award, Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web, and his manuscript Just Listen was a finalist for The New American Fiction Prize. His work has been also featured in the Best of the Net Anthology and Wigleaf’s Top 50 Fictions. His first collection of stories An End To All Things was published by Atticus Books in December of 2012 and has been reviewed in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Publisher’s Weekly, and other national magazines and journals. Recently his collections The Hook and The Haymaker and I Am The Oil of The Engine of The World were acquired by Split Lip Press and his crime-novel Bring Me The Head of Yorkie Goodman acquired by New Pulp Press. He can be reached on Twitter at @jysexton and his website (jysexton.com) has plenty of neat drawings.

  Creative Writing Faculty:

• Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/Bring-Me-Head-Yorkie-Goodman/dp/0692387560/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=&dpID=51nuN9psUDL&preST=_SY344_BO1,204,203,200_QL70_&dpSrc=detail

  About the Author
  A born-and-bred Hoosier, Rowdy Yates (Jared Yates Sexton) is an expat working as an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Georgia Southern University. Since earning his MFA from Southern Illinois University in 2008, he has published over sixty stories and articles in publications such as Salon, The Southern Humanities Review, PANK, Hobart, and elsewhere. His work has been nominated for a handful of Pushcart’s and The Million Writer’s Award, was judged a finalist for the New American Fiction Prize by Lee K. Abbott and has been featured in Best of the Net and Wigleaf’s Top 50 Fictions. His first book, An End to All Things, was released by Atticus Books in 2012. Split Lip Press will release his next two collections, The Hook and the Haymaker and I Am the Oil of the Engine of the World, in 2015 and 2016, respectively. In his spare time he serves as Editor-in-Chief of the literary magazine BULL and writes screenplays and covers politics. His website is at jysexton.com and he maintains a Twitter account at @jysexton.

• Daily Beast - https://www.thedailybeast.com/fascism-runs-in-my-american-family

  Fascism Runs in My American Family
  Jared Yates Sexton
  12.10.17 12:00 AM ET

  The change first came in the weeks after September 11th. Whereas my family had kept their slurs and fascist ideologies largely confined to the safety of our homes, now they were openly having these conversations with other likeminded people in public. At lunch I’d overhear neighbors refer to “towelheads,” “sandn*ggers,” and it was nothing for a quick chat at the Wal-Mart to be punctuated by a call to bomb every man, woman, and child in the Middle East until there was nothing left.
  “Turn the desert into glass,” they said. “Let God sort ’em out.”
  My family had a history of making those comments, only they’d always sequestered them behind closed doors and kept them among family and neighbors. The tragedy of 9/11 knocked those doors down, though, and brought their bigotry and fascist impulses into the open, gave them comfort and ample opportunity to voice their prejudices in open air, at least when they pertained to Muslims.
  In the years following, there were less of these open displays as polite society frowned upon them, but they didn’t stop altogether. They were adamantly in favor of the Iraq War, an unjust invasion, and openly supported waterboarding and torture and, like their eventual hero Donald Trump, they thought there should be even more violent methods of getting information.
  Like many, I celebrated the night Barack Obama was elected President of the United States of America. Coming from my background, I wasn’t sure if an African American could overcome the deep-seated prejudice in this country, but I was pleasantly surprised to be proven wrong. My partner at the time had just opened a bottle of champagne when my phone buzzed on the table. Expecting it to be one of my friends in similar merriment, I saw a text from a relative reading “Attention All Whites: Report To The Cotton Fields Tomorrow Morning.”
  Online, I saw that that relative, along with a few others, were posting racist memes that, with very little work, could be traced back to Facebook sites that served as fronts for white supremacist groups. Obama’s eight years in office yielded more and more of these posts as my relatives openly expressed offensive sentiments and, at times, wished death upon the president. Supported by others like them, and falling more and more in line with those white supremacists, I realized the conversations that’d began in our living room were leaking out into the world proper.
  Recently, at a speaking engagement, an audience member stopped me as I walked out of an event. He was well dressed in a houndstooth blazer, a white pin stuck to his lapel with the name TRUMP struck through with a red line.
  “What’d you mean back there,” he asked, “when you said Trump was just a symptom of something larger?”
  I tried to explain to him that Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party, and his eventual election to the White House, was the result of something that had been brewing in America long before the billionaire mogul had ever thrown his hat into the ring. I explained that he’d become a symbol for people like my family, who had long behaved in racist, misogynistic ways and held deeply troubling beliefs.
  The man in the houndstooth coat seemed bewildered. “Those people exist?” he asked, scratching his chin. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone like that. How many are there?”
  “I don’t want to alarm you,” I told him, “but we’re surrounded by them.”
  I didn’t know that some people didn’t grow up like I did. Reality is funny like that. When you’re young and unaware the rest of the world outside your door looks exactly like the one behind it. Not until I got older did I realize my family was poor, that other people weren’t surrounded by dysfunction, half-baked conspiracy theories, and ignorance.
  When I was younger, it was nothing to hear the people around me use racist slurs. They came all hours of the day, some of them reactions to the news or whatever TV show happened be on, other times they were just casual declarations, as if somebody was remarking on the weather or tossing out suggestions for dinner. There wasn’t an ethnicity spared, save, of course, for our own.
  I heard relatives wonder aloud if African Americans were better off under slavery.
  If all the other races would be happier if they left America and formed their own countries.
  If maybe the wrong side had won the Civil War.
  It was nothing for them to admire Adolf Hitler, the most common refrain being that “he had some good ideas, he just went too far.”
  There were some, however, who didn’t think he’d gone far enough.
  Of course, racism wasn’t their only vice. They were misogynistic as they maintained that a woman’s place was the kitchen. They sneered at “faggots” and “queers,” sometimes laughing about how they were doomed to eternities in Hell or joking about wanting to murder them. That impulse, to murder, was omnipresent. They longed for the days when lynch mobs and the Ku Klux Klan kept African-American men in line. They regularly talked about wanting to shoot people with their guns as they cleaned their weapons on the kitchen table.
  I always felt like an outsider with my family. The things they said, I’d argue, ran counter to the ideals of America, which they called “The Greatest Country on God’s Green Earth” and honored by flying flags or hanging star-spangled decorations on the Fourth of July. I was the only one who read the Constitution, who studied the history of our founding and the principles of the Enlightenment it was based upon.
  Eventually I left for college and found my own people who didn’t express such fascist and ignorant beliefs. I visited for the occasional holiday, kept in decent enough touch, but I felt confident knowing that people like my family would never be in charge of the country they understood so poorly.
  My experiences on the 2016 campaign trail were pretty standard before I went to my first Donald Trump rally. Like others, I’d considered Trump to be a sideshow that would run its course before the field narrowed to more serious competitors. And, like others, I’d heard his speeches that ran around the clock on cable news and was certain someone expressing such vulgar and offensive ideas didn’t stand a chance of winning the office.
  I was wrong.
  Trump maintained his momentum in the polls largely because of his offensive statements. People like my family loved that he called Mexicans rapists, that he said African Americans are “living in hell,” that, at my first Trump rally, he rolled out his plan to ban Muslim immigrants. Here was a man who spoke their language. Here was a man who lived in their world.
  For too long they’d been manipulated by a Republican Party that played on their worst fears but never intended to give them power. They’d voted out of fear for decades. Fear of African Americans. Fear of immigrants. Fear of the world changing. They supported Republicans even though, in their guts, they never trusted them. The GOP was the party of wealth, and many of them, like my family, had been raised to be suspicious of Republicans altogether.
  Now, Donald Trump wasn’t just placating them, he was one of them. He said the things they said, believed the things they believed. His “tough talk” and “straight shooter” delivery sounded a lot like the racist and misogynistic conversations taking place at my family’s dinner table.
  As a result, Trump dominated the Republican primary while his rallies turned into mobile safe spaces for people to be as ugly and offensive as they wanted. Inside those rallies, Trump’s faithful were free to spout racial slurs, demean anyone they disagreed with, and call for political opponents to be locked up or hung. I heard them shout “hang Hillary,” or talk about Clinton being stood in front of a firing squad, some of them saying they’d like to fire the last shot or miming the pulling of a trigger. In other rallies, as the media ran stories detailing Trump’s scandals, they discussed how good it would feel to torture and ultimately murder journalists they believed to be traitors.
  Meanwhile, the alt right, a group of white supremacists hiding behind the new, cleaned-up moniker of “white nationalists,” were gaining power and influence. In Cleveland, at the Republican National Convention, I saw rising stars of the alt-right flaunt their newfound stardom among the Republican faithful. They held packed events, partied until dawn, and toasted the death of the old guard.
  My family bought in big. In addition to Trump signs and hats, they were on social media posting more racist memes, articles from Breitbart, the home of the alt-right, that regurgitated racist ideology. When Steve Bannon came on the campaign and leashed Donald Trump to teleprompters and his speeches, my family was absolutely hooked. The rhetoric he pushed, the soft appeal of white nationalism, was what they had been looking for, what they had been spouting, their entire lives.
  After Trump’s election, YouGov released a poll that shocked the country. In it, 35% of people voting for Donald Trump admitted to having a favorable opinion of Russian President Vladimir Putin, nearly four times as many as those who held a favorable opinion of outgoing President Barack Obama. How was it, people asked, that anyone could possibly prefer a foreign authoritarian who had murdered his opponents and cracked down on dissenters?
  Unfortunately, this problem isn’t as new as it seems. The base that supports Trump, and, by extension, approves of thugs like Putin, have been here for as long as there’s been a country. The ideological ancestors of people like my family, and Trump’s continued base, are those who defended the scourge of slavery in the writing of the Constitution and in blood during the Civil War. Their roots can be traced back to those same Confederates who, despite claiming to be patriots, seceded from the Union when their practice of owning slaves was endangered.
  Simply put, people like this have never been interested in the principles the United States of America were founded upon. The framers of the Constitution, against the backdrop of the Enlightenment, meant for America to be a free republic that progressed and realized that age’s potential. In a sense, the Founding Fathers gave us an aspirational document that would establish the idea of freedom and challenge us to continue to hold it and improve as we did.
  My relatives, and others like them, have clung to that Constitution when it has served their interests, primarily the 2nd Amendment, which protects their guns, and occasionally the 1st Amendment, when they feel pressured by shared society. But they are quick to abandon the Constitution when it suits their interests. I’ve heard them regularly disrespect due process and the banning against cruel unusual punishment when the defendant is somebody they disagree with or dislike. The media they consume, both in the form of Fox News and their movies and television shows, showcase a country where the Constitution has been corrupted and vigilantes and strong men are needed to bring order back to bear. They hoard weapons, supplies, and daydream about the day the government will fall and they’ll be free to remake the country as they see fit.
  I cannot say they are fascists, but I can definitely say they hold fascist ideas. This is why they hardly blink when Donald Trump quickly erodes the normal order of the government, why they’re not concerned when he undermines the Freedom of the Press or cozies up to authoritarian leaders. They love it when he tells policemen to be rough on suspects. They want someone who plays nuclear chicken with a despot while the lives of hundreds of million innocent people lie in the balance.
  In this first year of the Trump presidency, it is now obvious that his base is not only loyal, but perfectly fine with and accepting of authoritarianism and fascist ideology. They’ve stood by their avatar as he called white supremacists who marched on Charlottesville, Virginia with fascist paraphernalia and chanting Nazi slogans “good people,” even after that rally caused the murder of Heather Hyer. They’ve cheered him on as he’s tried to manipulate the Department of Justice into prosecuting his political rival Hillary Clinton. And now, in recent weeks, they’ve shown a willingness to support a serial child predator in Roy Moore if it means maintaining power.
  While Trump’s behavior and Moore’s shameful bid to win Alabama’s senate seat should give us pause, we need to be careful in not just focusing on our current predicament. Trump is an existential threat on our democracy and Moore is a sign of just how badly we’ve backslid, but they are not the totality of this problem. They’re symptoms of a much larger disease that has always threatened this country and has now grown and rested power over the government. Long after Trump is out of office, and after history has forgotten Roy Moore, we’ll still be dealing with fellow citizens who have fascistic sympathies and ideals, and heaven help us if anyone more competent than Donald Trump figures out how to play to their worst instincts.
  We can’t forget, after all, that we’re surrounded.

• New York Times - https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/opinion/donald-trumps-toxic-masculinity.html

  New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/opinion/donald-trumps-toxic-masculinity.html

  Donald Trump’s Toxic Masculinity
  By JARED YATES SEXTONOCT. 13, 2016
  STATESBORO, Ga. — Growing up in a factory family in small-town Indiana, I led an uncertain life with only a few constants: fear of losing it all, frustration with a world out of our control and the ever-present need to “be a man,” a phrase that always carried with it an air of responsibility and torment. To be a man was to maintain the appearance of toughness, to never let on that you were weak or in pain.
  It was a command I heard repeatedly at home and around town, handed down by my stepfather and role models. My stepdad was fond of saying, “Boys don’t cry — crying’s for women.” One of my high school football coaches gave injured players this choice: “You a football player or are you a little girl?”
  Donald J. Trump, especially the Donald J. Trump we heard last week on tape, is nothing new to me. His macho-isms, his penchant for dividing the world into losers and winners, his lack of empathy for anyone but himself — it all reminds me of home, and the sense I had, even as a boy, of a system of privilege that has ailed this country since its beginnings, but now seems to be, and sees itself, fading away.
  Taking refuge in traditional masculinity is a coping mechanism that works only so much as it deadens a man and his emotions. In its most pure state, masculinity is a hardening shell meant to protect men from the disappointments and travails of life, a self-delusion that preserves them from feeling overwhelmed by the odds against them.
  Mr. Trump was not lying in this week’s presidential debate when he called his offensive conversation “locker room talk.” I heard similar chatter among my teammates as they laced up their cleats and donned their pads for a big game. Young men brag about sexual conquests, demean those who have denied them and dehumanize their opponents, real and imagined. Fear precipitates this chatter — a fear of pain, a fear of mortality, a fear of rejection and, most of all, a fear of inadequacy.
  They’re the fears of a child, and most men outgrow them. But for various reasons, not all do. Their masculinity, already a coping mechanism, becomes toxic.
  I’ve heard men attack the character of women in the same tone that an uncle of mine once used to call for the nuclear annihilation of the entire Middle East and the murder of every last Arab man, woman and child. I’ve heard men utter un-American things, things that directly contradict our country’s highest ideals, and then excuse it all with one of Mr. Trump’s pet phrases: “We live in the real world.”
  But the real world — complicated foreign policy questions, confusing social change, economic dislocation — is precisely what toxic masculinity is trying to avoid. It’s bigger than any one person, which makes it a threat to men who cling to the belief that they alone control their fate.
  Though such masculinity might temporarily shelter men from the pressures of their daily lives, inevitably it robs them of their lives: Disturbing trends show that men, especially the white men who make up a majority of Mr. Trump’s base, are suffering greatly for their posturing.
  From 2009 to 2014, while mortality rates fell for all other Americans ranging from ages 22 to 56, they rose for middle-aged whites, with most of the fatalities coming from what experts are calling “despair deaths,” including drug overdoses, alcohol-related liver disease and suicide, all consequences of unhealthy coping mechanisms. More and more men are also suffering and dying from heart disease, cancer and diabetes, the disease that claimed my father, a man who was so proud and so concerned with upholding his masculinity that he refused to see a doctor for decades, until it was too late.
  Our economy has left many of these men behind. White men, statistics show, have borne some of the worst of the effects of globalism and the Great Recession, and still suffer from the largest shortfall of jobs.
  That’s why it’s no surprise to see Mr. Trump’s core supporters not only cling to him after the tape came out, but even tighten their grip, doubling down with misogynistic T-shirts and chants at rallies. He’s the furthest thing from the working-class men of my childhood, but whatever his motives for demeaning women, these supporters hear in him an echo of their own desperation.
  I can still remember, as a child, listening to the same man who’d told me to leave the crying to the girls as he sobbed alone in his room. My stepfather was a truck driver, and after he’d left his rig and clocked out of his shift, he would often lock himself in his bedroom. I could hear him, though, and I could hear when my mother, a woman he’d derided and belittled as being weak, came to him and did the heavy lifting for them both.
  Jared Yates Sexton is an assistant professor of creative writing at Georgia Southern University.

• Fear No Lit - http://www.fearnolit.com/fail-better-jared-yates-sexton/

  QUOTE:
  In a way, I just wanted to be there as the campaign unfolded. I reached out to Dan Cafaro, the former publisher of Atticus Books/Review, and said I wanted somewhere I could write analysis and articles and he graciously let me do it. I never intended to end up in the middle of any controversies or gain any attention. I just wanted to try this out and engross myself in a cultural moment.
  I think growing up in the Midwest gave me insight into a part of the country that has been pretty misunderstood, particularly in publishing and media. The current cultural crisis we’re in has its roots in what’s happened to my family and neighbors, and I think it’s been more or less the problem that’s really drug us into our situation now.
  FAIL BETTER: PUSHING BOUNDARIES WITH WRITER JARED YATES SEXTON
  SEPTEMBER 20, 2017 JAMES FIGY FAIL BETTER
  When I first met Jared Yates Sexton, he wasn’t a well-known journalist, a Twitter icon with 142 thousand followers, a bane of the alt-right, or a constant recipient of death threats. This all happened during the 2016 presidential race, as Jared started renegade reporting Trump rallies — live-tweeting and writing blogs for the lit mag Atticus Review. Back when I met him, Jared was just a Hoosier boy who’d done pretty well, become a creative writing professor at Georgia Southern University, and who, during a visit to Indianapolis, told a story slam the inspiration behind “Punch for Punch.”

  In this piece of flash fiction from The Hook and the Haymaker, the protagonist explains, “The simple truth of it is one day I woke up in a house … [nicer] than any house I’d ever live in before or ever thought I’d end up in.” His rough upbringing feels like a different lifetime. But after going punch for punch with a middle-aged man in a bar, he tells his girlfriend, “I can’t stand this shit,” talking about the wallpaper and fresh coffee every morning, all the nice things that are bound to break at some point. So she tears it all down, wrecks the whole house. And then, bloodied and out of breath, she asks if he’s happy. His answer is no. He wasn’t happy with the nice life, and isn’t happy now that it’s wrecked.

  In his newest book, Jared tells a similar story. This time it’s nonfiction. The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage explains how everyday Americans’ frustration with the establishment boiled over. It goes without saying that the whole campaign exemplifies how truth is stranger, messier, and less predictable than fiction. But that’s what makes Jared so great at telling it: He takes the fiction writer’s attention to narrative, to backstory, and to causes and effects, and he combines it with the journalist’s thirst to tell real people’s stories and to document a part of history. The new book shows how Americans weren’t happy with our government before the election, aren’t not happy now that it’s in chaos.

  Jared has two other books, I Am the Oil of the Engine of the World and An End to All Things. His creative work has appeared in Hobart, Monkeybicycle, PANK, The Whiskey Paper, and many others, and his journalism has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, and Salon. To honor my fellow Hoosier, I typed the quote pictured above on the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library’s typewriter. Unfortunately, the “S” key was broken. So I got creative. Concerned, later, that this would provide fodder for neo-nazis who see him as part of some lucrative global conspiracy, I asked if the dollar signs bothered him. “It would have to be focused on something in that arena,” he replied, totally unconcerned, “but you could be onto something larger.”

  What’s the worst thing you’ve ever written?
  Jared Yates Sexton: The worst thing I ever wrote was this bizarre little novel-project called The Wrecking Crew, which was a Richard Brautigan knockoff that I labored over for months and only ended up with something like eight pages to show for it. I drafted one outline after another and the thing couldn’t even coalesce into something I wanted to spend any time on, and yet it was so frustrating and flummoxing that I kept banging away at it.

  Writer Jared Yates Sexton
  Jared Yates Sexton, author of The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters upon Your Shore and three books of fiction

  Long story short, it was about this guy who lost everything because of a group called The Wrecking Crew that showed up and took care of “problems,” in this case it was a bull that got loose from a farm and wandered into a residential neighborhood. If my notes are to be trusted, and really they shouldn’t be, the guy would’ve joined the Crew and gotten into all kinds of nonsensical situations.

  It was basically a project I wasted my time on because I didn’t want to get into the actual hard work of other projects that meant something.

  Do you think there’s an illusion of fun when you’re trying to write something nonsensical? That because the characters and situations are silly, you will enjoy it more?
  JYS: I had this period in time where I was imposing restraints on my writing. From conversations I’ve had, it sounds like most everyone goes through this phase. You’re trying to write what the people who wrote before you would write, what they would appreciate, or what’s “right.” I think letting go of those ideas and restraints is incredibly fun.

  How do you judge whether a project really means something?
  JYS: In the past I worried over this. I really want writing that’s culturally significant, that speaks to culture as a whole, and I think focusing too much on that is its own special kind of fault, much in the same way self-serving writing, or writing that doesn’t attempt to speak to culture at all, has its own issues. Now, I feel pretty confident that what I’m thinking about, what I’m looking at, what I’m writing about, is focused more on some sort of meaning.

  After writing and publishing mostly literary fiction, your coverage of the presidential election and your new book speak to culture on a whole new level. Can you talk about why you felt compelled to write this book?
  JYS: In a way, I just wanted to be there as the campaign unfolded. I reached out to Dan Cafaro, the former publisher of Atticus Books/Review, and said I wanted somewhere I could write analysis and articles and he graciously let me do it. I never intended to end up in the middle of any controversies or gain any attention. I just wanted to try this out and engross myself in a cultural moment.

  You wrote during the campaign for some major media outlets. Did you learn about journalism from, say, working on the high school paper or taking a class in college? Or did you simply show up with open ears and eyes?
  JYS: I worked on my college newspaper as an opinion writer and editor, but never had much in the way of training. Most of what I know I’ve learned from reading interviews, books, and generally studying on my free time. The word “journalist” has changed so much in the past few decades, and there’s a real opening for writers to insert themselves, particularly considering that writing should be interacting with culture in general.

  What challenges have you faced, as a writer, with diving into a different genre?
  JYS: Honestly, there’s a certain amount of siloing that happens in writing. When I first started reporting, the response was, “You’re a fiction writer, this isn’t your lane.” And now that I’m established as a journalist and non-fiction writer, it’s a matter of people saying, “Well, are you choosing that over fiction?”

  When writing gets commodified — and boy does it — publishers and industry types don’t want to deal with multiple lanes. They want an easily marketable thing that doesn’t push boundaries. It’s a little disheartening, but, I think, ultimately it’s something that can be overcome.

  Not staying in your lane seems to me to be a Hoosier trait, especially when driving on 465. How do you think where you’re from has influenced who you’ve become as a writer?
  JYS: It’s been inescapable, honestly, in both good and bad ways. In part, I’ve had to get better at reading people because my family and loved ones aren’t great at actually communicating what they feel. Most of it is through nonverbal communication or shielded responses, so there’s a certain level of empathy and understanding that develops from that?

  By the same token, especially in politics, and of course fiction to an extent, I think growing up in the Midwest gave me insight into a part of the country that has been pretty misunderstood, particularly in publishing and media. The current cultural crisis we’re in has its roots in what’s happened to my family and neighbors, and I think it’s been more or less the problem that’s really drug us into our situation now.

  Learn more about Jared’s new book, The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage, and other recent writings on his website and follow him on Twitter.

QUOTE:
useful snapshot of a tumultuous
presidential race.

Print Marked Items
Sexton , Jared Yates: THE PEOPLE ARE
GOING TO RISE LIKE THE WATERS
UPON YOUR SHORE
Kirkus Reviews.
(July 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Sexton , Jared Yates THE PEOPLE ARE GOING TO RISE LIKE THE WATERS UPON YOUR SHORE
Counterpoint (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 9, 12 ISBN: 978-1-61902-956-9
The 2016 election finds the author on a search for the real America.Sexton (Creative Writing/Georgia
Southern Univ.; I Am the Oil of the Engine of the World, 2016, etc.) found himself in the political cross
hairs when some of his reportage on the Trump campaign drew attention--and even death threats--from his
supporters. "Trump wasn't the cause, he was the disease personified," writes the author, and then continues,
"Trump's true talent was finding the pulse of these ignorant, livid people and playing them like a virtuoso
strumming an instrument." Yet these people are as recognizable to Sexton as his own family and the bluecollar
milieu in which he was raised, and he understands how and why Hillary Clinton couldn't connect with
them. He has more of an affinity for Bernie Sanders, who inflamed the passions of the left just as Trump had
with the right and whose campaign went from making a statement to a surprisingly strong bid for victory.
The author reserves his deepest exasperation for those purists of the far left who refused to see a significant
difference between Trump and Clinton and who even turned on Sanders when he attempted to unify the
party. "They were purists," he writes. "To them, there was right and then there was wrong." Sexton's
campaign coverage comes from a ground-floor, grass-roots perspective. The only convention that gave him
press credentials was that of the Green Party, so he generally writes from the periphery, among the crowds
who sometimes seem more like mobs at the rallies. Whatever he learned didn't make him more prescient,
since pretty much until election night, he strongly believed (as did millions of others) that "Donald Trump
will not be president." His book sometimes feels like a leftist counterweight to Hillbilly Elegy, laced with
shots of Hunter S. Thompson, and it's clear that Sexton couldn't believe what he had seen until it was too
late. Though it lacks the stinging punch of Thompson, the book is a useful snapshot of a tumultuous
presidential race.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Sexton , Jared Yates: THE PEOPLE ARE GOING TO RISE LIKE THE WATERS UPON YOUR
SHORE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 July 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498344884/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1f1bcb01.
Accessed 29 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A498344884

QUOTE:
Sexton's reporting provides a unique nuts-and-bolts look at the campaigns, and his eyewitness
reports of the aggressive displays at Trump rallies are both terrifying and fascinating.The People Are Going to Rise Like the
Waters upon Your Shore: A Story of
American Rage
Publishers Weekly.
264.20 (May 15, 2017): p47+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage
Jared Yates Sexton. Counterpoint, $26 (320p)
ISBN 978-1-61902-956-9
Political columnist and fiction writer Sexton (I Am the Oil of the Engine of the World) shares a chilling
account of his cross-country tour covering the 2016 presidential election. He follows Trump to rallies in
South Carolina, where attendees he dubs the "White and the Angry" taunt Black Lives Matter protesters,
and to the carnivalesque Republican National Convention in Cleveland, where he observes the surreal
juxtaposition of Nazi salutes and a "Gays for Trump" event. The Clinton campaign, meanwhile, is a snooze
fest "engineered down to the last detail," which Sexton criticizes for failing to mobilize embittered young
Sanders supporters. Sexton highlights other pivotal events, such as the shooting at a black church in
Charleston that ignited debate about the Confederate flag, and he traces the modern political divide to Fox
News's founding. He also covers the chaotic inauguration, where protesters were teargassed blocks away
from tux- and gown-clad ball attendees. While the Trump-acolyte demographic has been explored ad
nauseam. Sexton's reporting provides a unique nuts-and-bolts look at the campaigns, and his eyewitness
reports of the aggressive displays at Trump rallies are both terrifying and fascinating. Readers still feeling
raw from the election, however, may not appreciate its rehashing. Agent: Christopher Rhodes, the Stuart
Agency. (Sept.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage." Publishers
Weekly, 15 May 2017, p. 47+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A492435655/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=75ae5b00.
Accessed 29 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A492435655

"Sexton , Jared Yates: THE PEOPLE ARE GOING TO RISE LIKE THE WATERS UPON YOUR SHORE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 July 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498344884/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 29 Jan. 2018. "The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage." Publishers Weekly, 15 May 2017, p. 47+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A492435655/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 29 Jan. 2018.

• Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/our-national-scream-on-jared-yates-sextons-the-people-are-going-to-rise-like-waters-upon-your-shore/#!
  Word count: 2148

  QUOTE:
  Sexton covers a race that was more of a national upheaval than political campaign. His chapters are full of often keen, always judgmental personal observations available to a guy free from the pack. It mixes personal accounts with broad campaign context and the pages flip.
  I just wish he had tried to get to the story that no one really covered: what the hell happened to a country radicalize it so much in eight years and what are the terms of assuaging it? His book is entertaining in the manner of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, in that it contains one man’s quirky observations. But that becomes its biggest flaw: it is so full of fear and loathing that Sexton missed the real story of what fueled American rage.

  Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/our-national-scream-on-jared-yates-sextons-the-people-are-going-to-rise-like-waters-upon-your-shore/#!

  Our National Scream: On Jared Yates Sexton’s “The People Are Going to Rise Like Waters Upon Your Shore”
  By Blake Morlock

  OCTOBER 20, 2017
  THE CAMPAIGN BOOK is its own genre, which you either eat up like cherry Pez or you shun entirely. Jared Yates Sexton, previously a minor-league pundit, is now making an outsider’s case for having penned one of the important books of the 2016 presidential race. The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage gets outside the iron ring of microphones that surround, suffocate, and trivialize campaign journalism.
  Sexton covers a race that was more of a national upheaval than political campaign. His chapters are full of often keen, always judgmental personal observations available to a guy free from the pack. It mixes personal accounts with broad campaign context and the pages flip.
  I just wish he had tried to get to the story that no one really covered: what the hell happened to a country radicalize it so much in eight years and what are the terms of assuaging it? His book is entertaining in the manner of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, in that it contains one man’s quirky observations. But that becomes its biggest flaw: it is so full of fear and loathing that Sexton missed the real story of what fueled American rage.
  What parts of the anger are tribal, racial, aspirant, regional, nihilistic, nationalistic, xenophobic, nostalgic, or just frustration from many realizing their government has ignored them long enough? Can they be united toward constructive goals or are they determined to pull the fabric of community apart?
  Sexton seemed satisfied to judge the radicals rather than listen to them. This was frustrating because his go-it-alone approach afforded him time, and beat reporters on the bus or jet never have time. Maybe it’s just a few hours after a rally to sit and talk with the people in a more involved fashion than simply getting quotes. Maybe it affords him an overnight stay and a night at the bar, or dare I say morning at the church, talking to voters. CNN doesn’t have that luxury. He did. During ordinary campaigns, such ground-level detail is simply referred to as “color,” meant to add flourish to a story.
  In 2016, the color was the real story because the only conversations that seemed to inform the voters were the words they shared among themselves. The national press had very little influence on the outcome and traditional opinion makers found their jobs obsolete.
  The Bernie Sanders figure in 2004 was Dennis Kucinich, and he limped through the Iowa Caucus before poofing into oblivion by New Hampshire. Four years earlier, in 2000, the character of “Donald Trump” was played by Pat Buchanan and — aside from a few bombastic lines reported with disdain — he barely registered on the national scene. Yet in 2016, a European-style socialist and an ethnic nationalist became the dominant forces in the United States’s two major political parties.
  Every presidential campaign seems to send a media-branded demographic into the spotlight: Reagan Democrats, soccer moms, NASCAR Dads, Security Moms, White Evangelicals, and the Latino. The last election the key players were the radicals on fire, who think the system is failing us all and is, perhaps, irredeemable.
  Sexton stood among the people destined to rise and he chose moral superiority over deeper understanding. To his credit, he ultimately realized he had been part of the bubble that “always pissed him off.” On election day, he smacked down a TV host who had problems with Clinton’s trustworthiness by declaring the race over and Trump a burned English muffin.
  Then Trump won and Sexton realizes the degree to which he had inhaled the establishment view. “I’d crossed over into the media and started looking at politics as a game of chess instead of a process by which real people were affected in real and lasting ways.”
  His descriptions of Trump supporters horrify the reader. Never mind the dirty language or failure to comply with political correctness — the author’s description of the Republican National Convention shows Trump supporters suddenly liberated from constraints of elitist propriety, with full license to uncork together the ugliness bubbling deep inside them. Free to mock women about rape and harass the homeless side-by-side with Nazi flags, they did just that unshackled from common decency.
  He also recounts just the kind of cognitive contortions Trump supporters twist themselves into to prove their own victimhood. The system, they argue, is out to prevent a reality TV host and oft-failed businessman from reaching the rank of commander-in-chief. A particularly priceless episode involves some rallygoers who convince themselves that Clinton was using a body double during her bout with pneumonia.
  More seriously, Sexton found himself stalked by Trump supporters after criticizing their worst instincts at a Trump event in North Carolina. He tweeted what the supporters were actually saying from the floor of a June 2016 rally, and Trump supporters immediately set about threatening his life.
  Then they seemed to show up at his house. A car circling his neighborhood one night parked repeatedly in his driveway with the engine running. His security system revealed that one day, someone had tried to break into his bedroom.
  Unlike the twists and turns of previous campaign chronicles like the “Making of the President” series pioneered by Theodore White, Sexton’s stories follow a depressing pattern. He drives to a Trump rally thinking the surge is about to ebb. He gets there to find Trump’s crowds as indulgent in The Donald as ever and then eavesdrops on some off-color conversation outside the hall. Then the event, itself, appalls him and he leaves disgusted, often to fortify himself at a local bar, where he may eavesdrop more on poisonous banter until his will to continue seems in doubt.
  Speaking as one who worked as a political journalist for more than 20 years, I can tell you that’s just a day in the life. Half the country has always seemed drawn to the apocalyptic fringe, on every side. Think about it. Add the 30 percent on the far right and the 25 percent on the far left equal 55 percent of the country is out there hugs the edge. That’s not new. What changed to make it crazy? It’s not a hard conversation to have if you just sit and listen without judgment. Then write the story, drink happily, and shoot pool. That’s how reporters do their job.
  Despite this tendency toward self-pity, Sexton’s approach does give him the ability to drop a truth bomb right down the stovepipe. When talking heads on cable TV ruminate that Trump’s hostile takeover of the GOP was a surprise, Sexton points out Trump just planted his seed on what had become fertile topsoil.
  “Trump hadn’t dragged anybody anywhere,” he writes.
  And he didn’t have impressive poll numbers because he’d somehow or another convinced anybody of anything. Trump was, as of that moment, the heartbeat of an America with which many of us were unaccustomed. His was not a proactive candidacy but a pure, unadulterated reaction to what a slice of the American people wanted.
  Sexton had that pegged in December 2015 while traditional reporters were still running the numbers that had always worked before. Talk radio and Fox News created a market that wanted something specific from their party, and the party wasn’t listening.
  There’s a great example about halfway through the book. The author discusses a road trip he took with a Trump supporter he calls “Dave.” Together they drove from Georgia to Ohio to see Hillary Clinton give a speech with opening act Elizabeth Warren.
  So there is an avowed liberal Sexton listening to “Dave” explain his opposition to the Civil Rights Act’s public accommodation requirement — the same portion of the law that tackled the vile “Open For Business — No Coloreds” signs of the mid-20th century.
  The same Sexton who complained of judgmental listening from the national media then sports the same short fuse when it came to outrageous statements. “I’d told myself, before picking Dave up that I wasn’t looking to argue issues,” he writes. “I was hoping to listen and find common ground. But I wasn’t going to just sit there and listen to outright intolerance.”
  Sexton can’t get out of his own way long enough to listen to Dave’s point. Is he arguing in favor of racism? Or is he arguing that a business owner has a right to be a jerk? How much of Dave’s argument is just basic libertarianism and property rights? Does that make him necessarily intolerant for questioning federal power?
  When Dave said he questioned the government’s role in legislating what’s in someone’s heart, Sexton concluded he “could not have been more wrong.” But wait a minute: didn’t liberals spend almost half a century arguing the Christian Right can’t “legislate morality”? This question gets skipped over.
  The sections on the progressive love affair with Bernie Sanders are less salacious and upsetting, but also problematic. While attending the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, he details the outrage of Sanders’s supporters who concluded neoliberal Hillary was enough of a menace to treat the Trump threat in lukewarm terms — a tradeoff that appalls Sexton. “And how could they not look at Donald Trump and see him as an existential threat to all of their stated beliefs and principles?” Unfortunately, those are the last words of the chapter. He never bothered to ask.
  It must be emphasized once more: Sexton is not a traditional journalist. He’s an English professor. Digging isn’t his specialty. He never had to knock on the door of a family whose kid just died to ask for a fifth-grade photograph. Next to that, asking a rabid Trump voter “What’s up?” is really nothing.
  Sexton is among the new breed of pundits whose online presence leaves them a tweet away from getting launched into the national conversation. The internet has so bladed and graded the journalistic hierarchy that anyone with wi-fi and a snappy point of view can get into the conversation. That’s how Sexton, a creative writing teacher and author in Georgia, passed from the online journal Atticus Review into the pages of The New York Times without so much as covering a city council meeting.
  He admits that he bought into the worldview offered by those who elevated him to national stature. They were certain Clinton would win big, and that Trump was an ugly stain of barbecue sauce that would be washed away like Pat Buchanan. And he bought it, despite everything he had chronicled in the book he was still writing.
  “There’s a cloistered community once you reach a certain point of visibility, and everybody gets to know one another,” he writes,
  There are inside jokes, rumors that never make it in print, a sort of high-school-clique mentality if high school were only full of nerdy writers wearing button-down shirts and slacks from Banana Republic. It was intoxicating to get a glimpse into that world, and when they told me, to a person, that election night would be over early, I believed them. If only I’d kept my eyes open.
  I would amend that last sentence. If only he’d asked more questions. He could have had a hell of a story.
  ¤
  Blake Morlock is an award-winning journalist and free-lance writer in Tucson and has covered politics for more than 20 years. His column “What the Devil Won’t Tell You,” appears regularly at the Tucsonsentinel.com.

• Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2017/08/the-people-will-rise-like-waters-upon-your-shore-by-jared-yates-sexton/
  Word count: 2010

  QUOTE:
  Begun with a series of tweets, The People Are Going to Rise fails to rise above surface-level observations, privileging white male rage over all other strains of anger that surge through America, including the anger we now see growing against the current administration. An anger that is a Jesus-like, table-flipping rage, which inspires disabled activists to be handcuffed at the capitol and grandmothers to don hats that look like vulvas. To ignore this anger is the willful ignorance of white male privilege.

  THE MYTH OF WHITE MALE RAGE: JARED YATES SEXTON’S THE PEOPLE WILL RISE
  BY LYZ LENZ

  August 14th, 2017

  Jared Yates Sexton’s book, like so many of our country’s problems, began with a tweet. In April of 2015, Sexton, a professor of creative writing at Georgia Southern University and a novelist, began working as an election correspondent for the literary magazine the Atticus Review. In June of that year, he attended, and live-tweeted, a Trump election rally. His 140-character observations quickly went viral. His tweets inspired the ire of the alt-right, death threats, two articles for the New York Times, an agent, and a book deal.

  The resulting book, The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage (out from Counterpoint Press tomorrow), posits itself as an exploration of the anger of the white, Red State American. This anger, Sexton argues is responsible for the rise and eventual election of Donald Trump.

  He writes of Trump’s early bid:

  While comedians and pundits dismissed him—The Huffington Post went so far as to cover his efforts in their Entertainment section rather than Politics—the dismissiveness and irony always tended to ignore two key factors that would fuel his ascent: the unvarnished anger of his message and the bold-faced bigotry he peddled.

  Beginning with the Iowa Straw Poll, dipping into the mass murder at the Emmanuel AME church, and swinging back out again, Sexton’s book is a whiplash trip through an all-too-recent election. There are quieter moments, too, of watching cable news in dingy hotels, and of drinking cheap watered-down beer with locals. But every moment is scorched through with white male rage.

  The book is meant to be a Kurtz-like journey into the dark heart of white Middle America but gets lost in the weeds of its own observations and instead becomes an idiosyncratic portrait of a country, revealing nothing except what our narratives have always overlooked—the concerns of women and people of color.

  Sexton reminds us often throughout the book that he is just a normal guy, from a blue-collar working-class family in Indiana. He identifies with the working-class bartender sick of the Green Party convention attendees. He shoots the shit with day laborers in front of a sketchy hotel. Sexton is a man of the people. And yet, his identifications don’t offer any insight when it comes to Trump’s supporters. While he claims to identify with their plight—poor, working-class, drinkers of bad beer—his language is the language of contempt. He expresses “disgust” with their rhetoric. He calls Antonio Sabato, Jr., an “idiot soap opera actor” and Rudy Giuliani a “race-baiting, rat bastard.” Roger Stone is an “infamous Nixon ratfucker.”

  “Trump’s true talent was finding the pulse of these ignorant, livid people and playing them like a virtuoso strumming instrument,” writes Sexton.

  With this language, Sexton shreds objectivity in a valiant Gonzo-like effort. But in a book that argues we are divided and stuck in our own echo chambers, Sexton’s own divide goes unexamined, his own echo chamber unchallenged.

  Sexton goes to lengths to deny his lack of objectivity, noting that despite receiving death threats, he can ride in a car with a Trump supporter—a situation that is more exemplary of white male privilege than some sort of hope for political unity. His contempt for Trump supporters ultimately undermines his analysis. A writer cannot offer humanity and complexity on the page while simultaneously insulting and despising his subjects. How can Sexton identify with the people he is profiling and also dismiss them with classist language? It’s a contradiction that would have been worthy of examination; instead, it’s glossed over.

  And his careless words also feed into dangerous stereotypes about Trump supporters that whitewash the complexity of our nation’s divide. Sexton goes to great lengths to identify Trump supporters as working class, a claim he never proves with statistics, only with anecdotes. But the claim doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Sarah Smarsh, writing for the Guardian in October of 2016, noted (in one of the few good takes on the election) that Trump supporters are hardly the oppressed classes of workers.

  Earlier this year, primary exit polls revealed that Trump voters were, in fact, more affluent than most Americans, with a median household income of $72,000—higher than that of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders supporters. Forty-four percent of them had college degrees, well above the national average of 33% among whites or 29% overall. In January, political scientist Matthew MacWilliams reported findings that a penchant for authoritarianism—not income, education, gender, age, or race—predicted Trump support.

  These facts haven’t stopped pundits and journalists from pushing story after story about the white working class’s giddy embrace of a bloviating demagogue.

  This giddy embrace of Trump is just what Sexton himself giddily embraces, taking pains to note with his novelist’s eye the caricatures of American rage, so much so that the profiles of everyone, excepting Bernie Sanders and Sexton himself, read more like parodies than profiles of actual humans.

  Writing for Jezebel, in one of the only other good takes of 2016, Stassa Edwards calls out this genre of white men elucidating the harsh realities of Trump rallies. She notes the inherent contradiction that plagues profiles of Trump supporters, including Sexton’s work:

  Ultimately, it seems that the Trump rally reportage piece has no purpose other than to reaffirm the importance of a certain kind of writer and his observations. It tells us little about the motivation of Trump voters and reduces violence to vignettes in an obviously grotesque sea of inhumanity. Its sole purpose seems to be the belatedly obvious conclusions of the reporter. It is, in short, an affirmation to both the writer and a particular kind of reader that they are good and moral and correct. That they both, by the very nature of taste and comportment and liberal consciousness, have nothing in common with the otherworldly inhabitants of a Trump rally.

  And this happens in The People Are Going to Rise because no one else, aside from Sexton, is allowed complexity or sympathy on the page. One of these moments of sympathy for Sexton comes when he details the death threats he begins receiving in the wake of his viral tweets, the mysterious cars that idle by his house late at night, and the campaign to get him fired from his tenure-track job. He is shocked at the outrage that has spilled over into threats of violence. America, he concludes must be in bad shape. No one can fault him for his fear. Death threats and online harassment are bad, and are things I understand well as a woman who has an opinion online.

  Sexton’s harassment is used as an example of rage from the teeming white mass of “others,” but it entirely overlooks the rampant history of online harassment and threats that have long plagued women in media. For Sexton, his vulnerability is evidence of a problem with all of America, while for women, harassment is just part of doing business.

  In a June 2016 article for The New Republic, Sexton does acknowledge gender differences in online harassment. But in that same article, Sexton also prides himself for being able to meet his harassers halfway, noting magnanimously that they often drop their arguments once he engages with them. In the book, there is a parallel conciliatory narrative, when he gets in the car with Dave, a young Trump supporter, and together they drive to a Clinton rally. Reading that section, the only conclusion that I could come to was the only conclusion not examined on the page: all things are possible when you are white, male, and don’t have to worry much about being murdered, raped, or having your kids’ safety threatened. What Sexton is proud of here, he touts as a way to overcome the divide, but it’s really just white, male privilege.

  The contrast between who is and isn’t allowed to feel rage in Sexton’s book is stark. In the wake of the massacre at the Emanuel AME in Charleston, Sexton shows not the righteous and justified rage of black writers like Roxane Gay. Instead, he shows conciliatory forgiveness, hymns, prayers, tears, and sadness. When it comes to women, Sexton writes off Hillary Clinton supporters as casting their lot with her only because Elizabeth Warren hadn’t run. Even when discussing Trump’s sexist language like “pussy grabbing” and “nasty women,” women are still not allowed to have rage. It’s never present on the page, which, in a book about American rage, is an egregious oversight. The overwhelming anger of women and people of color have fueled massive protests since the election, and Sexton doesn’t dwell on this at all.

  In a poignant moment, Sexton, on his journey with Dave, calls out a fake story about Clinton’s supposed anger, insisting to Dave that it can’t be true. Of all the fake stories that came out of the election, one about Clinton’s rage likely has the most veracity. But here again is an erasure of a woman’s anger. Instead, Sexton portrays Clinton only as a scheming politician, desperate to win, calling her rallies “slick to a fault” and comparing her campaign to the next rollout of an Apple product. And, of course, mentioning that she colors her hair. She’s more machine than human. It’s more flippant, Gonzo-like language that, again, undermines the thesis of the book and values white male rage over all the competing strains of anger in America.

  And what of the fifty-three percent of white women who voted for Trump? Where is their rage? Aren’t they, too, allowed to be more than just part of the screaming horde? Where do they fit in with the out-of-work, beer-swilling, male masses? I don’t have the answer, because those woman aren’t present in the book either.

  Make no mistake though, Bernie Sanders is allowed his rage. Sanders’s rage is portrayed as authentic and pure, somehow. It’s a rage for the people and of the people—a rage that is offset by Sexton’s highlighting of the moment when a bird landed on Sanders’s podium in March of 2016, which quickly became an Internet meme.

  Begun with a series of tweets, The People Are Going to Rise fails to rise above surface-level observations, privileging white male rage over all other strains of anger that surge through America, including the anger we now see growing against the current administration. An anger that is a Jesus-like, table-flipping rage, which inspires disabled activists to be handcuffed at the capitol and grandmothers to don hats that look like vulvas. To ignore this anger is the willful ignorance of white male privilege.

  ***

  Author photograph © Danielle Debien.

  Lyz Lenz is Managing Editor at The Rumpus. Lyz's writing has been published in the New York Times Motherlode, Jezebel, Aeon, Pacific Standard, and others. Her book on midwestern churches is forthcoming from Indiana University Press. She has her MFA from Lesley and skulks about on Twitter @lyzl. More from this author →

• Washington Post
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2017/08/25/a-tale-of-the-2016-presidential-campaign-with-lots-of-rage-and-plenty-of-beer/?utm_term=.6c187b448cd5
  Word count: 1688

  QUOTE:
  was published quickly for a book on the 2016 campaign, though not so quickly as to excuse its typos and cliches.
  Worse yet, Sexton, who teaches creative writing, delivers markedly uncreative prose, in which waters are always muddied, coffers are always lined, dealings are always shady, breath is always bated, memory lanes are always strolled and forests are always missed among trees. Maybe he was hung over while reviewing the final draft?

  A tale of the 2016 campaign, with rallies, rage and plenty of beer
  Review of "The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage" by Jared Yates Sexton
  By Carlos Lozada August 25, 2017 Email the author

  President-elect Donald Trump before his speech during a rally in Mobile, Ala., on Dec. 17, 2016. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
  THE PEOPLE ARE GOING TO RISE LIKE THE WATERS UPON YOUR SHORE: A Story of American Rage

  By Jared Yates Sexton. Counterpoint. 302 pp. $26.

  Jared Yates Sexton spent much of 2015 and 2016 attending presidential campaign rallies across the country. Along the way, he wrote dispatches about the rage he witnessed, particularly at Donald Trump’s events. He developed a sizable Twitter following. He received threats and hate mail. He went on radio and TV.

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  And he drank beer. Lots and lots of beer.

  Sexton iced his beers in trash cans if his hotel didn’t provide a refrigerator. He drank while blogging. He drank late at night while reading the diatribes in his inbox. He drank early in the day ahead of the Green Party convention. “It was my intention, if I was going to sit in that auditorium another four hours, to get a good buzz going, if not a full-on drunk,” he recalled. “Covering second-rate politics can do that to a man.” Later he found himself toasting the convention-goers alongside a bartender in a Houston pub. “These f—ing people,” he said, raising his glass.

  (Counterpoint Press)
  Sexton’s preoccupation with his alcohol consumption is one of the recurring oddities in “The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore,” an impressionistic and often disturbing account of the 2016 presidential race. If Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s “Shattered” picks apart the Clinton campaign from the point of view of strategists and staffers, Sexton grapples with the Trump campaign from the perspective of the crowds reveling in the candidate’s presence and message. It is a useful vantage point given the increasingly blatant bigotry in the months since the election. Even if marred at times by Sexton’s uninspired political analysis and unceasing affirmation of his working-class credentials, this book reveals the incremental nature of public displays of hatred, growing from harsh chants and bumper stickers to, say, an open and unmasked gathering of white supremacists in Charlottesville.

  “Bigotry and ugliness had been granted a foothold in the culture at large,” Sexton writes of the national mood after Election Day, “and suddenly white nationalists like Richard Spencer weren’t on the outside looking in anymore.”

  [Sorry, but I don’t care how you felt on election night. Not anymore.]

  Sexton didn’t see Trump coming, he admits. Like so many others, he had assumed that the reality-television star’s run would be a “historical footnote” and that the Republican Party would eventually settle on mainstream conservative respectability. (See McCain, John; Romney, Mitt.) However, “by keeping Trump at the forefront, and using him as an outlet for the more offensive elements of the party, the Republicans unwittingly encouraged and heartened a bloc they had always kept at bay.” And thanks to the insidious influence of conservative talk radio and Fox News — where “racism, sexism, and xenophobia are barely relegated to subtext,” Sexton writes — that bloc eventually came to embrace an “altered reality” that depicted Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and other liberals as forces for pure evil, prompting a confrontation that came in the form of Donald J. Trump.

  “Trump hadn’t dragged anybody anywhere,” Sexton writes, recalling the December 2015 speech when the candidate proposed a ban on Muslims entering the country. “Trump was, as of that moment, the heartbeat of an America with which many of us were unaccustomed. . . . This was a group that lived their lives steeped in unbelievable anger. They were either poor or less rich than they thought they should be . . . and they were, almost to a person, white. They were angry and all they wanted in the f—ing world was to blame somebody. Trump wasn’t the cause; he was the disease personified.”

  Over the course of the campaign, the Trump faithful grew more “comfortable and daring in their hate,” Sexton writes. At a rally in Greensboro, N.C., he sees that rather than just reacting to Trump, people began to feed off one another. “The gays had it coming!” screams one man, referring to the June 2016 massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando. Sexton hears several people using racial epithets to describe Obama. When Trump talks about revoking media credentials for The Washington Post, some men yell out, “Kill them all!” And after the event, Sexton witnesses an adult explaining to a small child that, of course, “immigrants aren’t people, honey.”

  Sexton’s tweets from the rally became a sensation that night — “you’re trending nationally,” his friends texted him — and earned him cable-news time but also online attacks and real-world scares. Outraged Trump supporters demanded that Sexton lose his job as a professor at Georgia Southern University. He received a stream of insulting emails, along with death threats. One night a car pulled into his driveway multiple times and lingered there; the next morning Sexton installed a security system and kept a loaded gun with him all day.

  Still, he continued writing about Trump rallies. “Hang that bitch!” he hears at one, among the choice insults and conspiracy theories directed toward Clinton. (Was she working with the Islamic State? Was she an agent of Jewish bankers? Maybe a Satanist?) At another, Sexton hears people discuss taking up arms against the news media. “The fever of the Republican Party wasn’t about to break,” he concludes by August 2016. “There was no turning back.”

  [Naomi Klein’s message to the anti-Trump left: You’re doing it wrong.]

  Sexton spends time at Clinton events, where some attendees still pine for Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and he lingers among Bernie Sanders fans, whose loathing for Clinton makes him feel “like I was in the middle of another Trump rally.” He even draws the title of his book from an overwrought street scrawl left by a Sanders supporter outside the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. But he claims the most familiarity with Trump’s white working-class supporters because, as he incessantly reminds, they’re his people.

  “I grew up in a family of factory people who cursed like they were on the line and didn’t have much time for talk that extended far past the weather or who was pregnant with whose kid,” Sexton writes in his prologue. Or, as he notes later, “I have known a lot of young men who reminded me of Dylann Roof,” the white supremacist who killed nine black parishioners in Charleston, S.C., in 2015. Such folks, he explains, are particularly susceptible to the outlandish ideas emanating from conservative radio and cable news. “Ever since I was a kid,” Sexton writes, “my family had been telling paranoid stories of far-flung conspiracies, chief among them that a shadowy cabal had rigged the economic system and intentionally shortchanged my people, the working poor.”

  Little surprise, they were ripe for Trump, whose “true talent was finding the pulse of these ignorant, livid people and playing them like a virtuoso strumming an instrument.”

  With some books, I care most what the writer thinks, and with others, what the writer knows. “The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore” falls in the latter category. Sexton’s dispatches are bracing; his after-the-fact analysis less so. Political journalists failed to “raise the level of discourse,” he complains. The Clinton campaign should have outed Trump as a fake populist rather than focus on his general unfitness for office. And when trying to understand Trump’s victory — even on election night, Sexton didn’t think it was possible — the author attempts to position himself above other commentators with this insight:

  “What a majority of pundits missed, however, was that there didn’t seem to be any single silver-bullet explanation as to what happened; rather, 2016 was a perfect storm, a potent mixture of the right people in the right places at the right time.”

  Remember: Perfect storms beat silver bullets.

  “The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore” was published quickly for a book on the 2016 campaign, though not so quickly as to excuse its typos and cliches. The author, for instance, refers to media mogul “Rupert Murdock” (it’s “Murdoch”), notes that Trump’s base never “waivered” and cites the candidate’s penchant for the “140-word tweet.” (That’s a long tweet.) Worse yet, Sexton, who teaches creative writing, delivers markedly uncreative prose, in which waters are always muddied, coffers are always lined, dealings are always shady, breath is always bated, memory lanes are always strolled and forests are always missed among trees. Maybe he was hung over while reviewing the final draft?

  The book concludes with Trump’s inauguration, and Sexton did down a few final beers during his train ride to Washington — “for therapeutic purposes,” he insists. Given the mood of the country since then, he’s probably not the only one tossing back a few bottles of therapy.

  Follow Carlos Lozada on Twitter and read his latest book reviews, including:

• Publishers Weekly
  https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-6923875-6-6
  Word count: 229

  QUOTE:
  violent, darkly funny novel
  over-the-top tale whose infectious energy will prove irresistible to devotees of modern noir.

  Bring Me the Head of Yorkie Goodman
  Rowdy Yates. New Pulp (newpulppress.com), $14.95 trade paper (230p) ISBN 978-0-6923875-6-6

  In this violent, darkly funny novel from the pseudonymous Yates (Jared Yates Sexton, editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Bull), Bill Wallace, an enforcer for a small-time East Coast drug lord known simply as Boss, has to collect an unpaid debt from Yorkie Goodman, a seemingly innocuous 62-year-old schlub. Goodman happens to live in Seymour, Ind., where 14 years earlier Wallace got into trouble and had to split town fast, leaving a broken-hearted woman behind. Boss pairs Wallace with Carp, a hit man who appears to be dying, and orders them to bring back macabre proof of a successful mission: Goodman's head. Naturally, things go south quickly, as Wallace has plans of his own. Carp, meanwhile, proves himself to be indestructible. The duo quickly end up on the radar of the local police chief, whose laconic old-school commentary addressed to his deputy provides comic relief. Yates (An End to All Things) gives obvious nods to the works of Cormac McCarthy and the Coen brothers (Fargo, in particular) in an over-the-top tale whose infectious energy will prove irresistible to devotees of modern noir. (June)

• Foreword Reviews
  https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/the-western-lonesome-society/
  Word count: 522

  QUOTE:
  Sparse, clean prose recalls westerns, pulp and noir fiction, and the cadence of another age. An easy read, Bring Me the Head of Yorkie Goodman is an entertaining few hours that leaves a larger impression than a book its size has any right to do. A highly recommended treat for fans of crime fiction.
  BRING ME THE HEAD OF YORKIE GOODMAN
  Rowdy Yates
  New Pulp Press (Jun 1, 2015)
  Softcover $14.95 (230pp)
  978-0-692-38756-6

  Alongside a portrayal of mobsters clinging desperately to their masculinity, Yates reveals the nonsense of violence and revenge.

  The assassins: two hit men from North Carolina. The target: a Hoosier farmer named Yorkie Goodman. The purpose: hard to say. Every player in this pulpy, character-driven crime novel has his own agenda.

  Hit man Wallace sees Yorkie’s death as a means of atoning for leaving his wife fourteen years earlier. Crime lord Boss uses the ensuing chaos as a means of toughening up his stepson and nominal heir, Abel. Carp, a bizarre murder savant, merely wishes to be thorough and professional in achieving his goal. As bodies pile up and the theoretically simple mission becomes complicated, the members of the conspiracy against Yorkie Goodman will be tested, tormented, and maybe, just maybe, will live to see their own brand of justice served up to an unfair world.

  Despite its preponderance of middle-aged mobsters, Rowdy Yates’s Bring Me the Head of Yorkie Goodman is a coming-of-age tale, a song of accidental and often abortive manhood. Couched in a combination of selfishness and guilt, Wallace’s attempt to take responsibility for his wrecked relationships flies in the face of what he must do for Boss. It is incompatible with his status as an emotionally responsible adult, unresolvable right down to the cinema-worthy climax. Boss’s own fraught relationship with Abel speaks to his desire to pass on, at all costs, a violent hypermasculinity that has become nonsensical in its new modern context. One word neatly describes all of the men of Bring Me the Head of Yorkie Goodman: obsolete. They are dead ends struggling to hold onto the memory of the good sons, good husbands, good workers, and good fathers they believe they could have been, if only for their own idiotic mistakes.

  Sparse, clean prose recalls westerns, pulp and noir fiction, and the cadence of another age. An easy read, Bring Me the Head of Yorkie Goodman is an entertaining few hours that leaves a larger impression than a book its size has any right to do. A highly recommended treat for fans of crime fiction.

  Reviewed by Anna Call
  Fall 2015

  Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The author of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the author for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.

• Publishers Weekly
  https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-9840405-1-3
  Word count: 260

  QUOTE:
  Characters frustrated by situations beyond their control
  Though some of his characters' voices blend together and lack nuance, Sexton is successful in earnestly capturing their futile grasps at agency.
  An End to All Things
  Jared Yates Sexton. Atticus Books (Itasca Books, dist.), $14.95 (216p) ISBN 978-0-9840405-1-3

  Characters frustrated by situations beyond their control populate Sexton's debut story collection. The narrator of opener "Just Listen" urgently introduces Sexton's marginalized, ignored middle-class Midwesterners; compassionately-created yet defeated characters like the father in "The Right Men for the Job" whose family's "luck had run out." While drunk and aimlessly driving around town, he feels "happier than [he]'d been in a real long time." Adultery is another theme weaving through the stories; those betrayed are left feeling hopeless, such as the man in "Old" who loses the "love of [his] life" to a guy "who's never worked a day in his life." The spurned lover of "Reservation" drives hours to the Hopi reservation where his ex-girlfriend lives just to retrieve his father's toolbox that she took when she left. In "To the Thirsty I Will Give" Sexton even ventures to the devastated Gulf Coast, where a fisherman who lost his boat first during Hurricane Katrina and again in the BP oil spill passes time reading his wife's adulterous emails before tracking her down on a date to attack her lover. Though some of his characters' voices blend together and lack nuance, Sexton is successful in earnestly capturing their futile grasps at agency. (Dec.)

• Portland Book Review
  http://portlandbookreview.com/2013/04/an-end-to-all-things/
  Word count: 273

  QUOTE:
  compelling.
  suggests that he has a long literary career ahead of him, and readers should be excited for that.
  An End to All Things
  by michaeld on April 7, 2013
  0
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  An End to All Things4stars

  Good Until the End

  By Jared Yates Sexton

  Atticus books, $14.95, 223 pages

  An End to All Things is a short story collection about ends of sorts. It shows the end of relationships, end of innocence, and the end of very many, many bottles of alcohol. It depicts characters and those small, seemingly insignificant moments in their lives that reflect their utter humanity. Readers should definitely read this book from beginning to end because the book takes some interesting thematic choices towards the end.

  While reading these stories, this reviewer became very reminiscent of Raymond Carver. In fact, a good way to describe these stories would be Carver-lite. The characters are exceedingly human and they can’t do anything right no matter how hard they try to make themselves happy. While they do read like classic short stories, the stories in this collection share a similar voice, almost too similar, but that’s not necessarily a problem since they are all very compelling. This collection is Jared Yates Sexton’s first collection, which suggests that he has a long literary career ahead of him, and readers should be excited for that. Definitely a good read.

  Reviewed by Gregory A. Young

  [amazon asin=098404051X&text=Buy On Amazon][amazon asin=098404051X&text=Buy On Amazon&template=carousel]

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