Twenty Summers

Recorded by Twenty Summers on August 18, 2020. All Rights Reserved.

Authors Damon Young and Rion Amilcar Scott kick off the first-ever virtual Twenty Summers festival with an epic, sprawling conversation about barbershops, Covid’s impacted on their work, Lovecraft Country, humor in writing, I May Destroy You, Kanye West, Black success, and the perils of white validation.

Damon Young is a writer, critic, humorist, satirist, and professional Black person. He's a co-founder and editor in chief of VerySmartBrothas—coined "the blackest thing that ever happened to the internet" by The Washington Post and later acquired The Root—and a columnist for GQ. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, LitHub, Time Magazine, Slate, LongReads, Salon, The Guardian, New York Magazine, EBONY, Jezebel, and the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. His debut book, What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker, won the Barnes & Noble Great Discovery Prize for Nonfiction (2019).

Rion Amilcar Scott is the author of the story collection, The World Doesn’t Require You (Norton/Liveright, August 2019), a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. His debut story collection, Insurrections (University Press of Kentucky, 2016), was awarded the 2017 PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the 2017 Hillsdale Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. His work has been published in journals such as The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, Crab Orchard Review, and The Rumpus, among others.

Recorded at the Hawthorne barn on August 3, 2019 by Twenty Summers. All Rights Reserved. 

"Meet Jeremy O. Harris: The Queer Black Savior the Theater World Needs." So read a recent headline in Out magazine; Vogue anointed him “one of the most promising playwrights of his generation." The hype is understandable. Though still in his final semester at Yale Drama School while this conversation was filmed, Harris has had two plays in production Off Broadway before runaway Broadway success with SlavePlay. Daddy, the second, stars Alan Cumming and Ronald Peet. Joining him on our very own stage to discuss his work and career was cultural critic Emily Bobrow, who observed in the Economist that Harris writes about race and sexuality "with humour, intellectual rigour, nods to pop culture and an engaging sense of spectacle," asking audiences to confront their own complicity in prejudice.

Recorded at the Hawthorne barn on June 8, 2019 by Twenty Summers. All Rights Reserved.

Recorded at the Hawthorne barn on May 31, 2019 by Twenty Summers. All Rights Reserved. 

Recorded at the Hawthorne barn on June 15, 2019 by Twenty Summers. All Rights Reserved.

Recorded at the Hawthorne barn on June 15, 2019 by Twenty Summers. All Rights Reserved.

Recorded at the Hawthorne barn on May 17, 2019 by Twenty Summers. All Rights Reserved.

Recorded at the Hawthorne barn on June 7, 2019 by Twenty Summers. All Rights Reserved.

Recorded at the Hawthorne barn on June 7, 2019 by Twenty Summers. All Rights Reserved.