Brian Broome
Brian Broome was born in 1972 and grew up in Warren, Ohio, a post-industrial city in the northeastern part of the state that had seen its steel industry collapse and much of its economic and social fabric fray. He grew up Black and gay in a working-class environment where neither of those identities had much room for expression, and his memoir is centrally concerned with the damage—to the body, to the psyche, to the capacity for love—that comes from spending decades trying to become someone acceptable rather than someone real.
Broome struggled for years with drug and alcohol addiction, moving through various cities and trying on various identities before getting sober and eventually enrolling at the University of Pittsburgh, where he earned his MFA in creative writing. He has taught writing at the University of Pittsburgh and developed a reputation as a teacher and essayist whose work combines confessional directness with literary sophistication and a bone-dry wit that prevents his darkest material from becoming overwhelming.
His memoir, Punch Me Up to the Gods, published in 2021, won the Chautauqua Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Kirkus Prize. The book structured its narrative around a recurring encounter: a young Black father on a Pittsburgh bus teaching his small son how to perform Black manhood in America—how to be hard, how to be tough, how to suppress the softness that invites violence and contempt. Broome used these observed scenes as a frame for his own story of learning and failing to perform that same hardness, of the addiction and self-destruction that were in part the costs of that performance, and of the long road toward a self that could finally be inhabited rather than merely endured.
The book was widely praised for its formal inventiveness, its ferocious honesty, and its refusal to offer easy redemption. Broome wrote about Blackness, queerness, masculinity, addiction, and class with equal parts vulnerability and fury, producing a memoir that functioned also as an analysis of the systems—familial, cultural, racial—that shape which kinds of people are considered fully human and which must prove it. His voice was unmistakable: funny, fierce, tender, and utterly without self-pity.
Brian Broome continues to write and teach in Pittsburgh. His debut established him as a significant new voice in American memoir, one capable of taking the most personal material—shame, desire, self-destruction, and the slow emergence from it—and making it resonate with the larger conditions that shape individual lives.