Michael Kleber-Diggs and his twin brother, Martin, grew up in Kansas City, their family part of a prosperous community of Black medical professionals. Their father had never learned to swim, so when he wanted to buy a boat, their mother, a former lifeguard, agreed on the condition that her sons take swimming lessons. Then their father was murdered in an act of random violence, and everyone’s lives changed – but for Michael, in the years and moves that followed, swimming remained a constant.
My Weight in Water is the intimate memoir of a swimmer. It is a story of race and recreation in America – of segregation, desegregation, and justice – told through one family and their lives in the Midwest. It is a reckoning with the concept of self-care and a plea for joy. Most of all, it is a book about what it means to love an activity that leaves you vulnerable – your mostly unclothed body in close proximity to other mostly unclothed bodies, moving through the same water – when you are marked as an outsider by both your race and your size.
Transparently and gloriously written, My Weight in Water relates what it costs one swimmer to enter the pool and why he does it anyway, imagining a future where all people have access to an activity that renders us weightless.
Michael Kleber-Diggs is the author of the poetry collection Worldly Things, which was awarded the 2020 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. His work has been anthologized in You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, edited by Ada Limón; There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis, edited by John Freeman and Tracy K. Smith; and A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars. Kleber-Diggs teaches poetry and creative nonfiction through the Minnesota Prison Writers Workshop. He was born and raised in Kansas and now lives in St. Paul.
