LitFest 2024: Writing Our Own Story: The Art of the Memoir with Damon Young, Francine Prose, & Abdelrahman ElGendy

How do we write down our own stories? How are our stories interpreted and consumed by the masses? And how do those interpretations make us view our stories differently? Accessible and intimate, memoir is one of the most popular genres among readers today. In this panel, we invite three authors in different stages of memoir writing to consider these questions and share their experiences. 

Abdelrahman ElGendy is currently writing and editing a memoir of his six years as a political prisoner in Egypt. Francine Prose is a prolific fiction writer and literary critic whose first memoir, 1974, was just published in June 2024. Pittsburgher Damon Young’s What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays quickly rose to critical acclaim after its publication in 2019. The panel will contain a mix of discussion and brief readings from each of these talented memoirists, moderated by our very own Executive Director (and published memoir author) Caro Llewellyn. 

You can purchase your own copy of 1974 by Francine Prose and What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker by Damon Young at City of Asylum Bookstore.

Stick around after the program for a tour of our House Publications on Sampsonia Way! The tour groups will leave at 2pm for a 20 minute tour, giving attendees enough time to get settled for the next program in our LitFest lineup.

About the Authors:

Abdelrahman ElGendy is an Egyptian writer, translator, and activist from Cairo based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A former six-year political prisoner in Egypt, ElGendy writes about counter-narratives, state-manufactured archival silences, and abolishing empathy as an extension of colonial violence. His writing appears in the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Guernica, AGNI, Mizna, The Markaz Review, Truthout, Mada Masr, and elsewhere. A Samir Kassir Press Freedom Award winner, ElGendy is a 2024-25 Steinbeck fellow at San Jose State University, a 2022 Dietrich fellow at the University of Pittsburgh’s Nonfiction Writing MFA, and a Heinz fellow at Pitt’s Global Studies Center. His work has received awards or scholarships from Logan Nonfiction Program, Tin House Workshop, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Community of Writers Workshop. He is the winner of the 2024 Courage to Write award by the de Groot Foundation, the 2024 Turow-Kinder Award in Fiction, and was a finalist for the 2021 and 2023 Margolis Award for Social Justice Journalism.

Damon Young‘s debut memoir, What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir In Essays (Ecco/HarperCollins), won the Thurber Prize for American Humor and Barnes & Noble’s Discover Award, and was nominated for a PEN America award, an NAACP Image award, and a Hurston-Wright Legacy award. Damon is also a founder of the culture blog VerySmartBrothas, and was a contributing columnist for The Washington Post Magazine, a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, a columnist for GQ, and was the creator and host of the Crooked Media podcast “Stuck With Damon Young.” Currently, he is the inaugural writer-in-residence at the University of Pittsburgh’s David C. Frederick Honors College.

Francine Prose is the author of twenty-two works of fiction including the highly acclaimed The Vixen; Mister Monkey; the New York Times bestseller Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932; A Changed Man, which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her works of nonfiction include the highly praised Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, which has become a classic. The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, a Director’s Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Prose is a former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.

About the Moderator:

Caro Llewellyn is the Executive Director of City of Asylum and author of the memoir Diving Into Glass.