Hari Ziyad

Hari Ziyad is the author of the text. Because Black Boy Out of Time is a memoir, Ziyad writes from their first person point of view. They are a Black queer individual residing in Brooklyn, New York. They grew up predominantly in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. They lived there with their mother, Mata, father, Daddy, and 18 siblings.

At the start of the memoir, Ziyad sets out to retrieve his childhood self, or Inner Child. In the prologue, Ziyad says that for years “I was busy contorting myself to become the man I thought I had to be—severing myself from my own tenderest aspects to make myself palatable to a cruelly normative world” (7). They learned from a young age that their effeminate qualities were not only unacceptable, but worthy of punishment and shame. Therefore, when they moved to New York City to attend “New York University’s...