Kiese Laymon with friends: How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America

Join bestselling and award-winning author Kiese Laymon for the launch of the revised edition of How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. Kiese is joined in conversation by Kai M. Green, Darnell L. Moore, Marlon Peterson, and Mychal Denzel Smith. Purchase a copy here: https://www.strandbooks.com/search-results?page=1&searchVal=Kiese%20Laymon%20how%20to%20Slowly%20Kill%20Yourself%20and%20Others%20in%20America&type=product

Author and essayist Kiese Laymon is one of the most unique, stirring, and powerful new voices in American writing. How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America is a collection of his essays, touching on subjects ranging from family, race, violence, and celebrity to music, writing, and coming of age in Mississippi. In this collection, Laymon deals in depth with his own personal story, which is filled with trials and reflections that illuminate under-appreciated aspects of contemporary American life. New and unexpected in contemporary American writing, Laymon’s voice mixes the colloquial with the acerbic, while sharp insights and blast-furnace heat calls to mind a black 21st-century Mark Twain. Much like Twain, Laymon's writing is steeped in controversial issues both private and public. This collection introduces Laymon as a writer who balances volatile concepts on a razor's edge and chops up much-discussed and often-misunderstood topics with his scathing humor and fresh, unexpected takes on the ongoing absurdities, frivolities, and calamities of American life.

Born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, Kiese Laymon, Ottilie Schillig Professor in English and Creative Writing and the University of Mississippi, is the author of the novel Long Division and the memoir Heavy.

Darnell L. Moore is the author of the 2019 Lambda Literary Award-winning memoir, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black & Free in America, which was listed as a 2018 NYT Notable Book and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers' pick. Moore is also a writer-in-residence at the Center on African American Religion, Sexual Politics and Social Justice at Columbia University, and a 2019 Senior Fellow at the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California. He is currently at work on his second book, which is tentatively titled, Unbecoming: Visions Beyond the Limits of Manhood.

Marlon Peterson is founder and president of Precedential Group, a social justice consultancy that works to address the trauma revolving around the intersections of race, gender, violence, police violence and community violence. He is also the host of the DEcarcerated podcast which highlights the journeys of resilience, redemption, and success of formerly incarcerated people. Marlon's first book, titled: Bird Uncaged: An Abolitionist's Freedom Song will be released with Bold Type Books in Spring 2021.

Mychal Denzel Smith is author of Stakes Is High (2020) and the New York Times bestseller Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching (2016). His work has appeared in several publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, The Nation, New Republic, GQ, Bleacher Report, The Atlantic, and Harper's. He is featured in and was a consulting producer for “Rest in Power: The Trayvon Martin Story,” the docuseries produced by Jay-Z. In 2014 and 2016, The Root named him one of the 100 Most Influential African-Americans in their annual list. In 2017, he was a NAACP Image Award Nominee.

Kai M. Green is an Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality studies at Williams college. They are a poet, filmmaker, and an interdisciplinary scholar that explores questions of Black sexual and gender agency, health, creativity, and resilience in the context of state and social violence. They employ Black feminist theory, queer of color critique, critical race theory, performance studies, media studies, and trans studies to investigate forms of self-representation and communal political mobilization by Black LGBT persons in the urban context.

Recorded November 10, 2020

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