We are ridiculously excited for this in conversation event with Kiese Laymon and Maurice Carlos Ruffin for the new reissue of How To Slowly Kill Yourself and Others In America.  This truly is a not to be missed event! This event will be held digitally via Crowdcast. Click here to register for the event with a donation of any amount of your choice. Donations will go to Black Lives Matter DC. You can order the book below, and will automatically be registered for the event if you order it from our website, and there will also be an option to buy the book during the event!

A revised collection with thirteen essays, including six new to this edition and seven from the original edition, by the “star in the American literary firmament, with a voice that is courageous, honest, loving, and singularly beautiful” (NPR).

Brilliant and uncompromising, piercing and funny, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America is essential reading. This new edition of award-winning author Kiese Laymon’s first work of nonfiction looks inward, drawing heavily on the author and his family’s experiences, while simultaneously examining the world—Mississippi, the South, the United States—that has shaped their lives. With subjects that range from an interview with his mother to reflections on Ole Miss football, Outkast, and the labor of Black women, these thirteen insightful essays highlight Laymon’s profound love of language and his artful rendering of experience, trumpeting why he is “simply one of the most talented writers in America” (New York magazine).

Born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, Kiese Laymon, Hubert McAlexander Chair of English at the University of Mississippi, is the author of the novel Long Division (soon to be re-released from Scribner) and the memoir Heavy.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin is the author of We Cast a Shadow, which was published by One World Random House. The novel was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the PEN America Open Book Prize. It was longlisted for the Center for Fiction Prize and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. The novel was also a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Ruffin is the winner of several literary prizes, including the Iowa Review Award in fiction and the William Faulkner–William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition Award for Novel-in-Progress. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the LA Times, the Oxford American, Garden & Gun, and Kenyon Review. A New Orleans native, Ruffin is a professor of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University, and the 2020-2021 John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. His next book The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You will be published by One World Random House in 2021.

Please note Loyalty has a zero tolerance policy for harassment or intimidation of any kind during this virtual event.

Kiese Laymon and Maurice Carlos Ruffin for HOW TO SLOWLY KILL YOURSELF AND OTHERS IN AMERICA