(run-time 90 minutes)

Authors Damon Young (What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker) and Brian Broome (Punch Me Up to the Gods: A Memoir) will discuss the trials and tribulations of putting out their debut books, publishing, their creative process, and other topics in this fifth installment of our LIVE series "How to survive in America" hosted by Damon Young.

Brian Broome a poet and screenwriter, and holds a BFA in Creative Writing from Chatham University. He is a K. Leroy Irvis Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh, and has been a finalist in The Moth storytelling competition, and won the grand prize in Carnegie Mellon University’s Martin Luther King Writing Awards. He also won a VANN Award from the Pittsburgh Black Media Federation for journalism in 2019. He has been published in The Ocean State Review, Delta Foundation’s Pride Magazine, The Guardian, Creative Nonfiction, Public Source, and more. Brian’s work explores the topics of racism, masculinity and the African American male. You can read a sample of his work in this 2019 story he wrote for Pittsburgh City Paper after the acquittal of the police officer who killed Antwon Rose II. Broome's new work Punch Me Up to the Gods: A Memoir is a poetic and raw coming-of-age memoir in essays about blackness, masculinity, and addiction, with an expected publication date in May 2021. He lives in Pittsburgh, PA.

Damon Young is writer, critic, humorist, satirist, and professional Black person. He's a co-founder and editor in chief of VerySmartBrothas -- coined "the blackest thing that ever happened to the internet" by The Washington Post — and a columnist for GQ. Damon's debut memoir -- What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir In Essays (Ecco/HarperCollins) --  is a tragicomic exploration of the angsts, anxieties, and absurdities of existing while black in America, and won Barnes & Noble's 2019 Discover Award. It was also longlisted for the PEN America Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award, nominated for an NAACP Image Award, and is a Krause Essay Prize nominee. NPR, which named it one of the best books of 2019, called it an "outstanding collection of nonfiction."  Damon currently resides in Pittsburgh's Northside, with his wife, two children, and his faithful bottles of Nexium and Lisinopril.

The Show Must Go On(line) is made possible thanks to generous support from the Benter Foundation, The Heinz Endowments, the Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation, the Opportunity Fund, The Pittsburgh Foundation, and an Anonymous Foundation.