After five years away, Literary Death Match returns to Boston — or, really, Cambridge — for our first-ever show at The Brattle, as part of our run-and-gun LDM documentary shoot. It’s going to be an electrifying night, so run don’t walk (but careful not to trip) for this grand return!

What is Literary Death Match? Part literary event, part comedy show, part game show, Literary Death Match brings together four of today’s finest writers to compete in an edge-of-your-seat read-off critiqued by three celebrity judges, and concluded by a slapstick showdown to decide the ultimate champion.

JUDGES: 
Literary Merit: Nell Scovell, TV writer, producer, director, and author of Just the Funny Parts. She collaborated with Sheryl Sandberg on the NY Times bestseller Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, created TV’s Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and has written for The Simpsons, Coach, Monk and way, way more

Performance: Kellie Carter Jackson, historian and author of the forthcoming We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance, and Force & Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (winner of the James H. Broussard Best First Book Prize and finalist for the Frederick Douglass and Museum of African American History Stone Book Prizes, and host of You Get a Podcast! (formerly known as Oprahdemics)

Intangibles: Ken Reid, comedian and host of the weekly podcast TV Guidance Counselor, he loves horror movies, bronze-age comic books, TV, punk rock, pie and pre-Millenium Popular Culture

Super-Intangibles: Owen Egerton, author, performer, and filmmaker, he’s writer/director of MERCY BLACK, the horror/comedy BLOOD FEST, and the psychological horror FOLLOW. He’s also author of The Book of Harold, the Illegitimate Son of God, Everyone Says That at the End of the World, the short story collection How Best to Avoid Dying, and Hollow which NPR listed as one of the best books of 2017

READERS: 
Round 1: 
* Aube Rey Lescure, a French-Chinese-American writer, she’s an Ivan Gold Fellow at the Writers’ Room of Boston, a Pauline Scheer Fellow at GrubStreet, and a finalist for the Boston Public Library Writer-in-Residence program. Her work has appeared in Guernica and Best American Essays, and her first novel, River East, River West, releases in January 2024

* Desmond Hall, author of the gritty YA novel Your Corner Dark, he’s taught high school biology and English; counseled teen ex-cons after their release from Rikers Island; and served as Spike Lee’s creative director at Spike DDB, and was named one of Variety magazine’s Top 50 Creatives to Watch

Round 2: 
* J.D. Debris, author of The Scorpion’s Question Mark (winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize), he’s received fellowships from DISQUIET, NYU, and Mass Poetry, and he’s received awards from Narrative and Ploughshares. As a recording artist, his albums include Black Market Organs and JD Debris Murder Club (forthcoming)

* E.B. Bartels, author of Good Grief: On Loving Pets, Here and Hereafter, former Newtonville Books bookseller, and a GrubStreet instructor, with an MFA from Columbia University. Her essays and interviews have appeared in Salon, Slate, WBUR, Literary Hub, Catapult, Electric Literature, The Believer, and The Rumpus

Hosted by LDM creator Adrian Todd Zuniga (author of the award-nominated novel Collision Theory)

Brattle passes not accepted.