Red Emma’s

A critic explores the paradox of finding community in “the dozens” while grieving. A violent town ritual causes an all-too-familiar moral panic. An email thread between friends on why we need an updated GREEN BOOK but for public toilets. All across the nation, “Karens” become illegal overnight. These are just a few of the hilarious worlds contained in Damon Young’s groundbreaking anthology featuring the best, funniest, and Blackest essays, short stories, letters, and rants.

With words that roast, ignite, and burn while connecting to and coalescing around a singular thesis, THAT'S HOW THEY GET YOU emphasizes how and why Black American humor is uniquely transfixing. This is a mixture of not just observational anxieties and stream-of-consciousness lucidities but also acute political clarity about America. Edited and with an introduction by Damon Young, the critically acclaimed author of WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU MAKES YOU BLACKER, the collection features new material from an all-star roster of contributors, including Hanif Abdurraqib, Mahogany L. Browne, Wyatt Cenac, Kiese Laymon, Deesha Philyaw, Roy Wood Jr., and Nicola Yoon.

Pittsburgh writer Damon Young’s debut memoir, WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU MAKES YOU BLACKER: A MEMOIR IN ESSAYS (Ecco), won the Thurber Prize for American Humor. A founder of the culture blog VERY SMART BROTHAS and creator and host of the Crooked Media podcast STUCK WITH DAMON YOUNG, Damon has been a contributing columnist for The Washington Post Magazine, a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, and a columnist for GQ and was the inaugural writer-in-residence at the University of Pittsburgh’s David C. Frederick Honors College.

Rion Amilcar Scott is the author of the story collections THE WORLD DOESN’T REQUIRE YOU and INSURRECTIONS, which was awarded the 2017 PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the 2017 Hillsdale Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He teaches creative writing at the University of Maryland, College Park. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020, and McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, among other publications.

D Watkins is the New York Times bestselling author of THE BEAST SIDE, THE COOK UP, WHERE TOMORROWS AREN’T PROMISED, BLACK BOY SMILE, and other books. His book WE SPEAK FOR OURSELVES was Enoch Pratt Free Library’s 2020 One Book Baltimore selection. Some of Watkins’s awards include the James Beard Media Award, Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship, Enoch Pratt Free Library’s Hackerman Writer in Residence, Vernon Jarrett Medal for Journalistic Excellence, Society of Professional Journalists Dateline Award for Commentary, Gold Signal Award, Johns Hopkins University Society of Scholars, Johns Hopkins University Distinguished Alumnus Award, CityLit’s Dambach Award for Service to the Literary Arts, and the Maryland Library Association’s William G. Wilson Maryland Author Award. Watkins is editor-at-large for Salon. Additionally, he is a writer on the HBO miniseries WE OWN THIS CITY and host of the show’s companion podcast. He was also featured in the HBO documentary THE SLOW HUSTLE. His work has been published in The New York Times, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and other publications. Watkins is a professor at the University of Baltimore, where he earned a bachelor’s of arts in history and a master’s of fine arts in creative writing. He also holds a master’s of education from Johns Hopkins University.