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Troy native Jay Barnes urges people his age to chase their dreams and he’s practicing what he preaches after releasing four books in less than a year.
Barnes, who grew up in Troy and graduated from Charles Henderson High School, is a student at Alabama A&M University but is also a published author.
“I’ve been a creator my whole life, I’ve been wanting to get my ideas out there since the ninth grade,” Barnes said. “I would write on sheets of paper, just put my thoughts and stories and ideas. I was a good kid but my imagination and ideas would deter me sometimes. So, I thought that I had to get this out someway, so that I could focus on what I needed. That’s when I started writing recreationally.”
Barnes said this led him to begin writing a screen play, which ultimately transformed into his first novel “Blind,” the first in his “Mirror” series. Barnes released “Blind” in July and followed that up with “Human” in November.
“They’re all stand alone stories but also interconnected,” Barnes said of the series. “It’s heavy on perspectives and social issues and different themes. ‘Blind’ was the first one and it follows a young screenwriter who is trying to make his way in an industry that can sometimes not be the best in terms of doing the right things and being able to make it where you want to be.
“It was a great way to start the series because it kind of mirrors me, because I want to do films and things of that nature. It was really cool to mirror myself and theorize what would I do if I was in this character’s shoes? The second one follows a character who is in college trying to maintain stability within himself and knowing his identity in this transition into college. It’s really cool to be able to release a story like that, while I’m in college myself.”
During that span, Barnes has also released two books of poetry, “From Cradle to Chaos” and “Mass Hysteria.”
“I started doing poetry a little after I started writing recreationally, probably in 2023, and to be honest, I never saw myself doing that,” Barnes recalled. “I’m a big super hero guy and thought I would be doing comics, but I’m a big lover of music, whether that be hip hop or R&B or rock. I see their music as poetry. I researched poets like Maya Angelou, J. Ivy and Tupac Shark was also a poet. I tried it and I was pretty good at it and that went right along with writing recreationally as a whole.”
Barnes’ most recent poetry book, “Mass Hysteria,” released in January and was a collaboration with fellow Charles Henderson graduate Dakota Masoner. Masoner illustrated the front and back covers of the book.
“Mass hysteria is like a collective psychological illness and I wanted to translate that into a book where I could vocalize how I feel and how we as a world feel,” Barnes continued. “No matter how you look or what kind of shape or size we all come in, there are positives and negatives. If you read the book, we look at the exterior and also the interior.”
