Keynote author Saeed Jones brings ‘The People’s Project’ to Decatur Book Festival
One week after President Donald Trump won the 2024 election, poet and memoirist Maggie Smith sent a text to her close friend, fellow poet and memoirist Saeed Jones.
While half the country was celebrating Trump’s triumph, her mind was reeling, contemplating the effects a Trump presidency could potentially have on issues she and Jones care about: trans people, immigrants, the National Endowment for the Arts, public media, racial equality, climate change.
Even though Trump had tried to distance himself from the objectives laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s conservative playbook Project 2025, she feared what might unfold in the year ahead. But rather than sink into sorrow, she tried to turn her fear into fuel. She wrote to Jones.
“My Project 2025:” the text read, followed by a list of her intentions for the coming year and beyond.
“(It was) a way of articulating — and even revising — how I planned to move through the world,” she later wrote in an essay.
For Jones, a Buddhist who grew up in Texas, Smith’s impulse to transform despair into motivation resonated with his religion.
“It was so profound to me,” Jones recalls. “It was like a door opened up in my mind, and all of that anxiety and fear, suddenly it was determination.”
Jones and Smith met in 2019 when Jones first moved to Columbus, Ohio, “on a whim” after spending a decade in New York. His friendship with Smith grew quickly. They would walk from their homes to meet regularly at their favorite pizza joint and talk.
But last September, when Jones moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, they became pen pals, trading text messages about the wild turkeys Jones saw in Cambridge, Smith’s children and, as it got closer to the November election, politics.
“Of course, those conversations became more earnest. We were worried,” Jones said.
The closer the election loomed, the longer the texts grew. Then came the impassioned, rambling voice memos.
“That’s when you know it gets really intense — when you start sending the voice memos,” he said. “You have so much to say, so many words, you can’t type it all out. So back and forth we went.”
When Trump won the election, Smith and Jones started to post snippets of their conversations on Instagram, where Jenny Xu, an editor for Simon & Schuster, saw them.
“That’s where this book started,” said Jones about “The People’s Project” (Washington Square Press, $22), an anthology he and Smith curated that came out on Sept. 9.
The anthology features works including personal essays, historical reflections, poetry and cartoons by notable authors, including Alexander Chee, Marlon James, Joy Harjo, Ada Limón, Kiese Laymon, Ashley C. Ford, Imani Perry and Eula Biss.
As the keynote speaker for the Decatur Book Festival, Jones will moderate a conversation on Oct. 3 between three authors featured in the anthology: Atlanta poet Victoria Chang, Nashville poet Tiana Clark and novelist Aruni Kashyap, director of the creative writing program at the University of Georgia.
Leslie Wingate, executive director of the Decatur Book Festival, said Jones was selected as the keynote by the festival’s programming committee, composed of representatives from local booksellers and literary leaders.
“It was really important that we bring in some of this — I don’t want to call it political programming — but maybe the-times-we-live-in programming that really addresses critical social issues and the fear and uncertainty and resilience needed at the moment,” Wingate said. “That kind of wraps up ‘The People’s Project’ to me.”
‘Community in book form’
To create “The People’s Project,” both Smith and Jones mined their personal contacts to reach authors who might have something to say about the moment.
“We basically asked, ‘What is wisdom from yourself, from your community, from your ancestors, that you’re drawing on now as we look forward?’” said Jones.
The authors could use Smith’s “My Project 2025” concept as inspiration or respond more broadly. Jones and Smith encouraged the writers to zoom out.
“We said, ‘Think about reading this book 50 years from now. Let’s really root ourselves in history … really think long-term,” Jones said. “ … That’s why we don’t name the president in the introduction. We try to just open it up because frankly what’s going on is bigger than any one politician or one political party. This is a global trend.”
The responses they received were wide-ranging. An essay by Eula Biss recalls a trip she took to France, where she learned about the contested history of the Vichy regime. A cartoon by Aubrey Hirsch tracks how she creates resistance by mothering her boys to become the men she wants to see in the world. Marlon James’ essay explores the role of fashion in rebellion and self-expression.
The meaning of the book expanded along the way.
“It started in a very specific way but really opened up,” Jones said.
In organizing the anthology, Jones said he kept rhythm and momentum in mind, ordering the pieces “like jazz” and crescendoing the energy. The book starts with comforting pieces and grows more fiery toward the end.
“I think you feel a sense of poetry and music to it,” Jones said. “This book is community in book form.”
Shifting perspective
Building a book from the collective experiences of others is a marked departure for Jones, who largely earned a name for himself from his own story.
His memoir “How We Fight for Our Lives” won the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction in 2019, a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography in 2020 and was named one of the Best Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review.” The book chronicles his life as a Black, gay man growing up in suburban Texas and his often fraught relationship with his Southern mother. His candor, humor and poeticism resonated with readers.
Before publication of his memoir, Jones garnered attention in literary circles for his poetry collection “Prelude to Bruise,” which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in 2014 and won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry in 2015. This collection, too, relied heavily on his own lived experiences and was inspired by his interior life.
But by 2022, when he published his poetry collection “Alive at the End of the World,” he began to shift from gazing inward to looking outward. In therapeutic terms, he moved from the Freudian to the Jungian. The move seems symbolic of Jones’ own understanding of how external influences like ancestry, history and culture affect one’s course.
“In ‘Alive at the End of the World,’ you see me fully as an adult … looking at what’s going on in this country, talking about systemic violence, climate change, looking out,” Jones said. “With ‘The People’s Project,’ (I’m) literally bringing other voices in the room.”
Jones is currently working on “Home Out There,” a memoir set to publish in 2027 that excavates both the interior and exterior for material. The memoir relates his own experiences to those of other cultural figures like Langston Hughes, Pauli Murray and Audre Lorde ― all individuals who, like him, had to “leave home in order to find home,” Jones said.
At the Decatur Book Festival, Jones’ keynote address, however, will focus primarily on “The People’s Project.”
His own poem in the anthology, titled “My Project 2025,” opens boldly: “I am having more sex. I am louder when I have sex.”
By the third line, the poem changes tone: “I am asking more questions. I am asking questions like ‘Why?’ And ‘What happened to make you feel that way?’ And ‘Do you feel safe here?’”
A few lines further: “I know I like to talk; I love the sound of my own voice, but I am going to shut up and listen more. Clearly, I haven’t heard all that’s been said.”
The poem is book-ended with the line: “I was sent into this life to love loudly.”
Its thematic thread — connection — is poignant.
“We are increasingly siloed from people with different perspectives for different reasons,” Jones said. “You don’t want to wait until you’re in a dire situation to learn how to connect with people.”
Building connection in spite of differences was essential for Jones growing up.
“I am a gay, Black man who grew up in Texas,” he said. “My high school, we were the Louisville High School fighting farmers. My mom raised me as a single parent, and we practiced Buddhism. I felt so out of place all of the time. If I had only learned to be comfortable with someone who was just like me, it would’ve never (worked) … I had to learn to develop these skills ― conversation, dialogue, charisma.”
Almost a year has passed since the 2024 presidential election. As Jones reflects on the past year and curating “The People’s Project,” he said he feels “affirmed.”
“I think it’s, in a way, affirming to see that so many of the concerns we had, we were right,” Jones said. “We were right to begin thinking about how (the election) would impact trans kids. We were right to think about what this means for immigrants, for undocumented people. We were right to think about what this means for people who are disabled.”
While he hopes “The People’s Project” illuminates the stakes, he said it is also meant to uplift.
“Sometimes if a hurricane is coming, I want someone to tell me a hurricane is coming,” he said. “(But) I believe this book is actually inspiring and joyful and hopeful. It’s also very wise.”
What began as two friends trading texts has evolved into a chorus of 27 voices daring to imagine, good or bad, what comes next.
Event preview
Decatur Book Festival keynote. Saeed Jones in conversation with Victoria Chang, Tiana Clark and Aruni Kashyap. 7 p.m. Oct. 3. First Baptist Church Decatur Sanctuary, 308 Clairemont Ave., Decatur. Free. Registration encouraged. decaturbookfestival.com
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