The Midtown Scholar Bookstore is thrilled to host award-winning author Joseph Earl Thomas in Harrisburg for a conversation and signing on his new novel, God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer. Thomas will be in conversation with award-winning author Damo Young. This event is free and open to the public!
To enter the signing line, books must be purchased from the Midtown Scholar Bookstore. Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event, or you may preorder a copy of the book for pickup/shipment. Signed books may not be available until after the event.
After a deployment in the Iraq War dually defined by threat and interminable mundanity, Joseph Thomas is fighting to find his footing. Now a doctoral student at The University, and an EMS worker at the hospital in North Philly, he encounters round the clock friends and family from his past life and would-be future at his job, including contemporaries of his estranged father, a man he knows little about, serving time at Holmesburg prison for the statutory rape of his then-teenage mother. Meanwhile, he and his best friend Ray, a fellow vet, are alternatingly bonding over and struggling with their shared experience and return to civilian life, locked in their own rhythms of lust, heartbreak, and responsibility.
Balancing the joys and frustrations of single fatherhood, his studies, and ceaseless shifts at the hospital as he becomes closer than he ever imagined to his father, Joseph tries to articulate vernacular understandings of the sociopolitical struggles he recounts as participant-observer at home, against the assumptions of his friends and colleagues. GOD BLESS YOU, OTIS SPUNKMEYER is a powerful examination of every day black life—of health and sex, race and punishment, and the gaps between our desires and our politics.
About the Author:
Joseph Earl Thomas is a writer from Frankford whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in VQR, N+1, Gulf Coast, The Offing, and The Kenyon Review. He has an MFA in prose from The University of Notre Dame and is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania. An excerpt of his memoir, Sink, won the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize and he has received fellowships from Fulbright, VONA, Tin House, and Bread Loaf. He’s writing the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, and a collection of stories, Leviathan Beach, among other oddities.
Damon Young's debut memoir, What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir In Essays (Ecco/HarperCollins), is a tragicomic exploration of the angst, anxieties, and absurdities of existing while Black in America, and won the Thurber Prize for American Humor and Barnes & Noble's Discover Award. Damon is also a founder of the culture blog VerySmartBrothas, and was a contributing columnist for The Washington Post Magazine, a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, a columnist for GQ, and was the creator and host of the Crooked Media podcast "Stuck With Damon Young." Currently, he is the inaugural writer-in-residence at the University of Pittsburgh's David C. Frederick Honors College.
