"If I Am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened" by Justin Glawe

Justin Glawe's new book, If I Am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened, provides a reporter's account of some of the biggest news stories of the past decade.Starting with the chaos that followed the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, If I Am Coming plunges the reader into the middle of the action both inside and outside the crime-scene tape.Glawe covered the civil unrest outside St. Louis for the Daily Beast and Vice.As a free-lance journalist, Glawe was on the road following Ferguson, tracking what seemed an endless stream of police killings, before heading to the border where immigration battles during the first Trump presidency were making headlines."Sinclair Lewis wrote in 1935 that fascism could come to America. El Paso in June shows it's here," Glawe wrote for Medium in 2019."The president and his anti-immigrant allies have decided to separate migrant mothers and fathers from their children, regardless of their reasons for coming here, which include extreme violence, poverty, and government corruption back home," he noted.In 2024, Glawe wrote a story for Rolling Stone about nearly 70 pro-Trump conspiracists who were made election officials in key battleground counties.Now 42, Glawe isn't on the road as much these days, choosing to file stories from his Savannah, Ga. home. His Substack column, American Doom, lists over 13,000 subscribers.The central Illinois native, who got his journalistic start as an intern with the Peoria Journal Star, now balances chasing down threats to democracy with a home life that includes his wife Sarah, two dogs, and playing with his band, the Savannah Morning Blues.