Please join Congress Square Park, Longfellow Books, and the MWPA as we help launch Ryan Britt’s new book, Phasers on Stun: How the Making (and Remaking) of Star Trek Changed the World. Award-winning writer Phuc Tran will join Ryan in conversation at Congress Square Park.
Hugo Award–winning writer Morgan Gendel notes, “Ryan Britt is our foremost sci-fi journalist, bringing to the pop culture of the last half-century a reporter’s eye and a fan’s caress. With Phasers on Stun!, it’s as if he used a nucleonic beam to probe our deepest questions about all things Trek—and then answered them!”
Ryan Britt is the author of Luke Skywalker Can't Read and Other Geeky Truths (Plume 2015), and writes about Star Trek weekly for Den of Geek! and Inverse, and has covered Star Trek for SyFy Wire, Tor.com, and Star Trek.com, extensively. Lev Grossman has said about him, "Ryan Britt is one of nerd culture's most brilliant and most essential commentators." Ryan's Non-Star Trek writing has appeared in Vulture, VICE, CNN Style, and The New York Times. He's also the senior entertainment editor at Fatherly.
Phuc Tran’s acclaimed memoir, Sigh, Gone: A Misfit's Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and The Fight To Fit In, received the 2020 New England Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2021 Maine Literary Award for Memoir. Sigh, Gone was named a best book of 2020 by Amazon, Audible, Kirkus Reviews, and many other publications.
His 2012 TEDx talk “Grammar, Identity, and the Dark Side of the Subjunctive” was featured on NPR’s Ted Radio Hour.
Phuc was a high school Latin teacher for more than twenty years while also simultaneously establishing himself as a highly sought-after tattooer in the Northeast. He graduated Bard College in 1995 with a BA in Classics and received the Callanan Classics Prize. He taught Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit in New York at the Collegiate School and was an instructor at Brooklyn College’s Summer Latin Institute. Most recently, he taught Latin, Greek, and German at the Waynflete School in Portland.