As of 2022, she completed her six-year term as the President of PEN International and the first woman to be elected since the organisation was founded in 1921. Suzanne Mallouk recognized the nuance that white folks don’t get with black folks; she knew Basquiat was a human being, not just a black man. Her debut novel, The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, will be published in January 2021. Despite the obvious wonders of his life, though, there were dark elements to his fiery personality constantly straddling immortal fame and self-destruction. Perhaps Clement allowed this digression because Stewart’s death is so shocking, so dramatic, so sad.

It was an unorthodox and bohemian childhood, living alongside artists, communists, revolutionaries and poets, and one that allowed an awakening of creative freedom and curiosity about the world. We meet two people who deeply love each other, but who are also two junkies in a toxic relationship - and the whole story unfolds during Basquiat's steep rise to the very top of the international art scene and lasts in all its glorious (and often not-so-glorious) turbulence until his death of a heroin overdose in 1988. A hotbed for hip hop, underground culture, and unmatched creative energy, it spawned some of the most significant art of the 20th century. In 1988, unable to deal with the demands that his new fame brought, Basquiat, the most successful black visual artist in history, died from a heroin overdose at age twenty-seven. Jennifer Clement works against this distorting narrative, and she knows what she's talking about: Not only did she know Basquiat, his girlfriend Suzanne Mallouk has been a friend of hers.Mallouk's first-hand accounts help the reader set her both as an insider and an outsider of it all — and, with Clement's touch, the book captures the rawest, most unflattering piece of biographical writing I had ever read. He spent a month in hospital with a broken arm and internal injuries so severe his spleen had to be removed. Clement is also the recipient of many awards including the Sara Curry Humanitarian Award, the Gran Prix des Lectrices Lyceenes de ELLE in France, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship and her books have twice been a New York Times Editor’s Choice Book.

It could have been me,” Basquiat said, and set about painting Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart). delivers real insight into the life of the brilliant artist as well as the glittering—but ultimately chaotic—world that consumed him. At the bottom there is a sequence of names, from left to right a crossed-out SAMO, followed by AARON, a name Basquiat often incorporated into his paintings, probably after the baseball player Hank Aaron, and then his own bold signature. The statements were so totally poised in their assault on art-world inanities that observers believed they were by a disaffected conceptual artist, someone already famous. She was awarded the NEA Fellowship for Literature and the Sara Curry Humanitarian Award for Prayers for the Stolen.There are other cameos for Andy Warhol and Julian Schnabel who only embraced him once he was famous. In its obituary, the New York Times observed that Warhol’s death the preceding year “removed one of the few reins on Mr Basquiat’s mercurial behaviour and appetite for narcotics”. She is best known for being an East Village artist in the 1980s and for her relationship with Jean-Michel Basquiat.