Every shooting leaves scars — seen and unseen, marking individuals, families, and communities. Every shooting ripples outward across space, and time. It can last years, lifetimes, sometimes for generations. Yet grief and the feelings around survival aren’t linear, said Brandon Wolf, and “they don’t happen the way you expect them to.”
Wolf survived the mass killing at Pulse nightclub in 2016. He lost not only his best friend but also a space where he felt he could be himself. His memoir, “A Place for Us,” chronicles how he channeled his grief into activism and advocacy — and, importantly, the book serves as a remembrance of his best friend, someone with “severe main character energy” who Wolf still wants people to get to know.
Trymaine Lee, an award-winning journalist and Trace board member, is an author of another deeply personal book about gun violence. In “A Thousand Ways to Die,” Lee examines his personal history and how shootings have taken generations of his family members, and how it relates to the toll of violence on Black America.
In a conversation at the 2026 Safer Together forum, Wolf and Lee discussed how people can be better allies to survivors, why gun policy on the local and state level isn’t “the JV league,” and why purpose can be “a double-edged sword.”