When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Trymaine Lee was 38, he suffered a sudden heart attack that nearly killed him. The incident made him reconsider the years he had spent reporting on the lives cut short by gun violence — and the stress it had put on his body.

"For the first time really, I had to look deep and engage with what was truly bearing down on my heart," he says. "And for me that had been more than a decade of telling stories of Black death and survival."

As a reporter in Trenton, Philadelphia and New Orleans, Lee covered the deaths of young men who looked like him. The victims were "wearing my same sneakers, same haircut," he says. "And you have to wrestle with seeing yourself in some ways, repeatedly gunned down, your body repeatedly falling. Tears for your death over and o

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