Guy Weston recently returned to freelance writing after a substantial career in public health, focusing primarily on HIV programs. His most recent writing is on topics related to the COVID-19 pandemic, health disparities, as well as African American genealogy and history. His earliest work focused on profiling the nascent HIV epidemic during its first decades, as well as LGBTQ issues.
From 2017-2019, he was a visiting scholar in the history department at Rutgers University, where he did research on antebellum free African Americans in New Jersey. Part of that research was published in the “Journal of the African American Historical and Genealogical Society.” Under the title “New Jersey: A State Divided on Freedom,” the article recounts fascinating details of free African American communities in southern New Jersey, who represented a majority of African Americans in that region as early as 1790.
Guy is one of three children born to Abe Weston, a career military serviceman, and Mary Weston, a homemaker who later became a special education teacher. As a child and young adult, he lived in England, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica and the United States, attending nine schools before graduating from high school in New Jersey. Recalling a childhood experience when his family lived in Puerto Rico at Thanksgiving, but was transferred to endure subzero chill factors in North Dakota by January, Weston says his military upbringing helped him to understand the world from multiple vantage points, beginning with his earliest memories. “It’s been an indispensable asset for my work as a writer, as a public speaker, and as a teacher,” he said. “You understand where people are coming from, even when you’re on opposite sides of the debate.”
Weston’s next major writing project is a family memoir about free black people in the north, who he believes are “virtually invisible” in the typical presentation of African Americans prior to the Civil War. He points out that free African Americans represented eleven to fourteen percent of the African American population in the decades leading up to the Civil War, noting that “free African Americans like the main character in ‘Twelve Years a Slave’ are not as uncommon as we might think.
Guy speaks Spanish with native proficiency.
