Robert Jones, Jr. was born in 1971 in New York, United States. In 2008, he created the literary platform Son of Baldwin, the codename by which he originally became known. His essays have been published in publications such as The New York Times,, Essence,, Variety and The Paris Review.. The Prophets (Companhia das Letras, 2023), his debut novel originally published in 2021, became a New York Times bestseller and was a finalist of the National Book Award for Fiction. The work tells the story of Isaiah and Samuel, young slaves who live on a plantation in the interior of Mississippi. Based on the love between these two men, Robert Jones Jr. creates a fascinating and brutal tragedy that combines two great works of African-American literature: the drama of sexual dissent and racist stigmatization present in the work of James Baldwin and Toni Morrison’s acumen in representing the experience of having been enslaved. The result is a unique prose celebrated by critics precisely because it captures, through this interweaving of the canon, a new poetics of the origins of the contemporary United States.
Translated by: Viviane Souza Madeira
