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, the novel Since I Laid My Burden Down, and 100 Boyfriends, a collection of stories. The recipient of a 2018 Whiting Award in Fiction, he was named one of the thirty-two Black Male Writers of Our Time by T: The New York Times Style Magazine in 2018. Purnell is also the frontman for the band The Younger Lovers, a cofounder 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. Born in Triana, Alabama, he's lived in Oakland, California, for more than a decade.
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Since I Laid My Burden DownA Novel
The congregation began to rustle in preparation for Sister Pearl. Sister Pearl had been the choir headmistress for forever and a day. She claimed many times that she lost her voice singing for the devil. Sometime in her twenties she decided she wanted to sing the dirty blues, like Aretha Franklin. She quit the church and started singing along the Chitlin Circuit in Chattanooga, Nashville, Louisville, and on up to Chicago. One day, she said, the Lord took her voice away, and that’s when she returned to church.
Since I Laid My Burden Down : A Novel -
Since I Laid My Burden DownA Novel
Later that same sermon, some bitch got so drunk on the Holy Spirit that she started screaming, “YAAAAAAAS JESUS,” and nearly tossed her baby into the back pew. Luckily, a man caught the toddler. As a child, DeShawn would see this hullabaloo and stick his nose back in the X-Men comic hidden inside his Bible. He later figured he learned more about morality in a year of reading X-Men comics than he would reading the Bible ten times in a row. This was truth.
Since I Laid My Burden Down : A Novel -
Since I Laid My Burden DownA Novel
DeShawn reasoned that he had seen his first hardcore porn movie by the time he was five—quite possibly before. One time he remembered a group of his cousins, younger uncles, and neighborhood boys all gathered in the den watching porn on VHS, and his grandmother walking in on them. There was no reaction on her face; she didn’t even raise her voice. She simply walked to the VHS player, turned it off, and took the tape with her, saying plainly, “Remember that the people on this tape are actors.”
Since I Laid My Burden Down : A Novel
“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 [on Since I Laid my Burden Down]
“I have always admired Brontez Purnell’s writing, and this novel is his greatest achievement yet. Purnell is never careful, never evasive. He hits you with honesty, passion, painful humor and never stops.” —Mike Albo, author of Hornitio [on Since I Laid my Burden Down]
“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 [on Since I Laid my Burden Down]
Selected Works
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Brontez Purnell is an important new voice: loud and beautiful, sexy and sweaty. His explorations of blackness, queerness, maleness, and Southernness take sharp, confident turns between raunch and rhapsody. Purnell has a gift for illuminating the different forms of care and connection, and somehow – through his own wit and heart – manages to rescue the notion of intimacy from cliché. His fiction has the burn of truth hard-won, and these slim books are rich beyond their bounds.