NABJ Authors Showcase 2025: Morgan Campbell in Conversation With ESPN’s Coley Harvey

Don’t just pencil me it. Write it in pen. Find a stone tablet and chisel it into the granite.

August 6 in Cleveland, opening day of the annual National Association of Black Journalists Convention, I’ll be presenting my memoir, My Fighting Family: Borders and Bloodlines and The Battles That Made Us, at the annual authors showcase.

We finalized this deal months ago, but I didn’t want to discuss it much in public until we had resolved a few final, but very important, details.

Like the day: Wednesday, Aug 6.

And the time: 4pm.

And the location: Huntington Convention Center, Atrium Floor 2, Room 202.

And, crucially, a co-host: Coley Harvey, ESPN’s all-star, all-purpose sports reporter.

It’s a full-circle moment for a long list of reasons.

First, there’s NABJ itself, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this summer, and which has done so much for so many of us over the years. As young journalist, you attend the convention to make the connections that can help bend your career trajectory upward. As a mid-career professional you’re still in work mode, but you’re also there to rekindle friendships that first ignited previous conventions. It’s a massive networking event, but it’s also a family reunion.

And this year it’s in Cleveland, a city I first visited back in October 2002, writing a SLAM magazine profile on Darius Miles. That story was one of three I wrote for SLAM and KING that fall, freelance pieces that help me smash the first of several glass ceilings I’d encounter at the Toronto Star.

Back then I was a sports agate editor who was trying, and mostly failing, to convince my new boss that I was actually a writer. The first time I handed him a folder full of my clips, he handed them right back to me.

“This could be edited,” he said.

His real meaning was clear. My best work was probably a result of sharp-eyed editors cleaning up my copy.

But when I showed him clips from magazines based in New York, he couldn’t dismiss it as a fluke. The day he decided to take me seriously as a writer was also the moment that opened the door for me to write “Long Shots,” the serial narrative that earned me a National Newspaper Award and long-overdue promotion.

So as a place to stage my first U.S. author event, Cleveland makes sense.

As for the choice of co-host?

Coley Harvey was an automatic.

He’s a fellow Medill alum, a fellow runner, and he’s been spreading the world about My Fighting Family since I sent him an advance reader copy in late 2023.

We met via another time-honoured tradition among Black journalists — we were the only two brothers in the press box at a Jays-Yankees game, so we started talking. I’d tell you it happens more often than you think, except it might not actually happens very frequently, given how few of us cover MLB.

But it’s how I met Julian Benbow of the Boston Globe, who furnished a blurb for my book’s cover. It’s how I met Rob Parker, who was the first Black general sports columnist at Newsday, and who encouraged me to blaze a similar trail at the Star. And it’s how I met Tim Smith, veteran of the NYT and the Daily News, now the longtime head of media relations at Premier Boxing Champions.

I don’t spend much time in press boxes anymore, but I’m still at NABJ on a semi-regular basis, meeting new friends, connecting with old ones, and, this year, lucking into the best way to launch the next phase of My Fighting Family’s marketing.

Besides the opportunity to discuss the book in public and sell copies directly, I’ll be locked in on Chicago-based outlets, building some media momentum ahead of my appearance at the South Side Lit Fest in September. After that, it’s full speed ahead to paperback pub day next January.

But before any of that happens, come see me in Cleveland alongside Coley Harvey, discussing your next favourite book. If you’re attending the convention, you might as well start it off right.

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