About How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America

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). (Scribner Book Company)

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

Minda Honey is the founder of TAUNT, a local indie outlet for Louisville, KY. She has a series of essays for Longreads on dating and politics and her writing has been featured by the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Oxford American, Teen Vogue. Her work is featured in “Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger” by Seal Press and in the forthcoming collection from Hub City Press, “A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South.” She's working on her memoir, An Anthology of Assholes, about dating as a woman of color in Southern California. Minda lives in Louisville, Kentucky where she serves as the Director of the BFA in Creative Writing program at Spalding University.

Kiese Laymon and Minda Honey discuss "How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America"