Damon Young

Damon Young’s debut memoir, What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays, won the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Damon is also a founder of the culture blog Very Smart Brothas and was a contributing columnist for The Washington Post Magazine, a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, a columnist for GQ, and the creator and host of the Crooked Media podcast Stuck with Damon Young. Recently, he was the inaugural writer-in-residence at the University of Pittsburgh’s David C. Frederick Honors College.

His new anthology, That’s How They Get You: An Unruly Anthology of Black American Humor, debuted June 3, 2025.