Audiences who have been with City of Asylum since we first launched online programming amid the COVID-19 pandemic will be familiar with Damon Young’s “How To Survive in America” livestreamed series. With guests like Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Friday Black, Chain-Gang All Stars), Bassey Ikpi (I’m Telling The Truth, But I’m Lying), Kiese Laymon (Heavy), and more, Damon offered audiences a front row seat to six intimate episodes of heartfelt, humorous, honest conversations with his fellow writers and friends. 

Making the leap from screen to stage, the series makes its in-person debut this December with new friends and a new topic of conversation: how to survive as an artist in America. The program will take the form of a panel, rather than one-on-one discussion. Moderated by Damon, fellow writers and friends Joy Priest, Adriana Ramirez, and Jesse Washington will discuss the realities of artist finances and the importance of community and collaboration to maintain a sense of security and support as creatives. 

About the Moderator:

Damon Young is a writer, satirist, and current host and creator of the Crooked Media podcast Stuck With Damon Young. His debut memoir, What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir In Essays, won the 2020 Thurber Prize for American Humor and Barnes & Noble’s 2019 Discover Award. He is also the co-founder and former editor-in-chief of the culture blog VerySmartBrothas. Damon was a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and a columnist for GQ and The Washington Post Magazine, and his writing has been featured in the Atlantic, Esquire, NY Mag, the Undefeated, Ebony, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. 

About the Panelists:

Adriana E. Ramírez is a Mexican-Colombian writer, critic, and performance poet based in Pittsburgh. She won the inaugural PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize in 2015 for her novella-length work of nonfiction, Dead Boys (Little A, 2016). Her reviews, essays, and poems have also appeared in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, ESPN’s The Undefeated, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica/PEN America, and Literary Hub among others. She occasionally reviews books for People Magazine. Once a nationally ranked slam poet, she founded the infamous “Nasty Slam” in Pittsburgh and continues to perform on stages around the country. She and novelist Angie Cruz founded Aster(ix) Journal, a literary journal giving voice to the censored and the marginalized. Her debut full-length work of nonfiction, The Violence, is forthcoming from Scribner.

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and the editor of Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology (Sarabande, 2023). She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, and the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Nation, among others. She is an Assistant Professor of African American / African Diasporic Poetry on the faculty of Pitt’s MFA program and the Curator of Community Programs & Practice at its Center for African American Poetry & Poetics.

Jesse Washington is a journalist, author and documentary filmmaker. He got his first front-page byline on his 19th birthday, on a story about Louis Farrakhan’s visit to the home of Tawana Brawley. Since 2015 he has been a senior writer for Andscape, formerly known as ESPN’s The Undefeated, a platform for telling Black stories. Jesse was named Best Columnist of 2023 by the Associated Press Sports Editors, and he is a two-time winner of the Best Feature award from the National Association of Black Journalists. He is co-author of I CAME AS A SHADOW, the autobiography of former Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson, a New York Times Notable Book of 2021; and LUCKY ME, the memoir of sports agent Rich Paul, a 2023 New York Times best-seller. Jesse’s novel, Black Will Shoot, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2008. Later that year he began covering race for AP. His work on that beat earned a National Journalism Award from the Asian-American Journalists Association and Journalist of the Year award from the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. In 2015, he moved to ESPN to help launch The Undefeated, which rebranded as Andscape in 2021. Jesse is married with four children and a member of the Baha’i Faith. He still gets buckets.

About Your Visit: 

The in-house restaurant Cucina Alfabeto is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, but the full bar will be open before the program from 6-7pm.