Day 1: "Jenisha from Kentucky"

Jenisha Watts (The Atlantic, October 2023)

This is the first post in a twenty-two-day series, counting down the days to publication (October 22, 2024) with a brief passage from each of the twenty-two essays included in The Best American Essays 2024. These excerpts were curated by Best American Essays Editorial Assistant Cheyenne Paterson and are presented in the order of the volume’s table of contents.

“I was beginning to see that writing things down, naming them, could make other people feel things. I felt freer writing than I did speaking out loud. I discovered books in Florida too. I lived in my head and went wherever the stories took me.”  —Jenisha Watts, “Jenisha from Kentucky,” The Atlantic, October 2023.