Kim Lute
Author of
What to do with Joy (HarperCollins/Amistad, 2027)
Kim Lute is an award-winning, former CNN TV journalist with a B.A. from the University of Denver and an M.F.A. in Narrative Nonfiction Writing from the University of Georgia. Lute’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, The Washington Post’s Root Magazine, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, The Atlantan, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, and Modern Luxury Magazine. Many of her essays have garnered widespread attention and been included in books from Color Stories: Black Women and Colorism in the 21st Century and the college textbook, Steps to Writing Well with Additional Readings. She’s been featured on Canada’s The Dr. Vibe Show to discuss her celebrated piece, “What America Owes Blacks,” and her essay “Time to Pay the Price for Slavery” drew widespread attention from Hollywood actors to politicians. She served as a contributing opinion writer for the Huffington Post.
As a dedicated organ donor awareness advocate, Lute partnered with the National Foundation for Transplants (NFT) for National Minority Donor Awareness Month.
Her literary memoir, WHAT TO DO WITH JOY will be the first transplant memoir written by a Black woman, and will be published by Harper Collins imprint, Amistad, in September 2027. Lute, a Colorado native, resides in Atlanta, Georgia.
Twitter / Instagram / Facebook / Represented by Kayla Lightner
BookS BY Kim
What to do with Joy (HarperCollins/Amistad, 2027)
What to Do with Joy: To Be Black, Driven and Chronically Ill, is the first transplant memoir written by an African American, who sets out to reclaim her body, find love, and become a journalist of consequence in the cutthroat, unforgiving world of TV news. What to Do with Joy is a sanguine examination of what it means when the scariest place to live is inside your own body, and poses the question: What do you do with a life that’s been saved but a body that remains forever broken? It explores what it means to have borrowed life from a dying stranger. Twice. This, as the author attempts to balance a social life while losing her colon and much of her dignity to an intestinal disease. And while being sick is a solitary experience, her fractured, bourgeois family plays a vital role, from her glamorous and difficult mother gaining genuine empathy only after being diagnosed with breast cancer; her two sisters finding their voices within the confines of the author’s illnesses; and her father, a narcissist and former alcoholic, believes in generational curses, that her illnesses were due to years of self-inflicted damage to his own liver, a conclusion that nearly cost him his life.