Home Out There

A memoir about leaving home to find home from the critically acclaimed poet and award-winning author of How We Fight for Our Lives.

When you are Black and queer, where in the world do you belong?

This is a question Saeed Jones carries with him, as he journeys from Scotland to Mexico, Berlin to Thailand, to cities and towns across America, via plane, train, and many, many a cab ride.

Saeed follows in the footsteps of his mother, a flight attendant, and decades of Black and queer travelers before him, in particular the poets Langston Hughes and Pauli Murray. Home Out There is as much about Saeed as it is about blood ancestors, artistic ancestors, kin and familiar strangers, all homing in on what it feels like to know where you are and why.

As Saeed makes his way across the country and around the world over the course of decades, including a year of travel in the wake of his mother’s passing, we also journey with Langston and Pauli at significant points in their youths as they themselves run away from and toward home, often simultaneously.

Home Out There revels in being alive and being a part of the world: bonding with Lyft drivers in New Orleans, grocery shopping with old ladies in Paris, eating fried chicken with expats in Bangkok, visiting a loved one’s grave in Memphis, all while trying to make sense of one’s restlessness. It is an ode to the power and necessity of freedom of movement—of finding yourself by decontextualizing or recontextualizing yourself within a certain surrounding, of experiencing the joy in solo travel or seeing something brand new with someone you've known for decades.

This is a book for those who may feel un-housed in their bodies or towns or movements, but who deserve the world.