Since I Laid My Burden Down

Brontez Purnell is a writer, musician, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. He is the author of a graphic novel, a novella, a children's book, and the novels 100 Boyfriends and Since I Laid My Burden Down. The recipient of a 2018 Whiting Writers' Award for Fiction, he was named one of the 32 Black Male Writers of Our Time by The New York Times Magazine. Purnell is also the frontman for the band the Younger Lovers, a co-founder of the experimental dance group the Brontez Purnell Dance Company, the creator of the renowned cult zine Fag School, and the director of several short films, music videos, and the documentary Unstoppable Feat: The Dances of Ed Mock. He lives in Oakland, California.

"This is the book you fall asleep reading and wake up excited to get back to. A Cult Masterpiece with so many memorable characters and phrases you'll want to grab strangers and read paragraphs to them." - Kathleen Hanna "Brontez Purnell is foul-mouthed and evil. Be warned: this book will make you cackle out loud like you've got the Devil inside you then it will break your heart. Be careful where you read it. BUT DO READ IT." - Justin Vivian Bond "Since I Laid My Burden Down has a fearless (sometimes reckless) humor as Brontez Purnell interrogates what it means to be black, male, queer; a son, an uncle, a lover; Southern, punk, and human. An emotional tightrope walk of a book and an important American story rarely, if ever, told." - Michelle Tea, author of Black Wave "More layered insight than the page count should allow." --MTV News "A complex... look at one man's experience of being black, queer, smart, soft, tough, artistic, and constantly in motion between rural and urban cultures." - Kirkus Reviews "Performance artist Purnell beautifully captures a personality through introspection and memory in this slim novel. . . . a compelling portrait of a particular disaffected kind of gay youth caught between religion, culture, and desire." - Publishers Weekly