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• Freedom House: Poems Deep Vellum (Dallas, TX), 2023
• Pretty: A Memoir Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 2024

1. Pretty : a memoir LCCN 2023042977 Type of material Book Personal name KB (Brookins), author. Main title Pretty : a memoir / KB Brookins. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Alfred A. Knopf, [2024] Projected pub date 2405 Description 1 online resource ISBN 9780593537152 (ebook) (hardback) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 2. Freedom house : poems LCCN 2023002917 Type of material Book Personal name KB (Brookins), author. Main title Freedom house : poems / KB Brookins. Edition First edition. Published/Produced Dallas : Deep Vellum, 2023. Description 100 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9781646052639 (trade paperback) (ebook) CALL NUMBER PS3611.B37 F74 2023 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• How To Identify Yourself With a Wound - 2022 Kallisto Gaia Press, Austin, TX

• KB Brookins website - https://earthtokb.com/

  KB Brookins is a Black, queer, and trans writer, cultural worker, and visual artist from Texas. Their writing is featured in Poets.org, HuffPost, Teen Vogue, Poetry Society of America, Oxford American, and elsewhere. KB’s poetry chapbook How To Identify Yourself with a Wound won the Saguaro Poetry Prize, a Writer’s League of Texas Discovery Prize, and a Stonewall Honor Book Award. Their debut poetry collection Freedom House, described as “urgent and timely” by Vogue, won the American Library Association Barbara Gittings Literature Award and the Texas Institute of Letters Award for the Best First Book of Poetry. KB adapted Freedom House into a solo art exhibit, which debuted at Prizer Arts and Letters in April 2024. Their debut memoir Pretty (Alfred A. Knopf) released on May 28, 2024.

  KB’s background in nonprofit management, student affairs, and K-12 teaching informs their cultural work. They founded and led two nonprofits with friends and community members to advance LGBTQIA+ justice and nurture/amplify marginalized artists in Central Texas. For two years, KB was the Program Coordinator of the Gender and Sexuality Center at the University of Texas at Austin, where they founded the Black Queer & Trans Collective and co-led the President’s LGBTQIA+ Committee. KB served as Project Lead for the Winter Storm Project, Do You Want a Revolution, and Watch Dogs. They also facilitated a youth video poem workshop on policing in Austin, Texas schools (which can be viewed here), and hosted a variety show to raise funds for trans people’s gender affirming care. Most recently, they successfully petitioned for the creation of the city of Austin’s adult poet laureate program.

  KB has earned fellowships and residencies from National Endowment of the Arts, Sewanee Writers Conference, Lambda Literary, Tin House, Civil Rights Corps, and elsewhere. Their poem “Good Grief” won the Academy of American Poets 2022 Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize. KB starred in a short documentary titled “Earth To KB”, which screened at film festivals in London, Dallas, New York, and Seattle. Currently, KB is an MFA candidate at The University of Texas at Austin. They do readings, speaking engagements, workshops, and consulting in their areas of interest.

  When not writing, KB enjoys reading good books, throwing a lil sumn’ on the grill, and sending memes to their spouse. Follow KB online at @earthtokb, and subscribe to their sporadic opinions/updates through their newsletter, Out of This World.

• Wikipedia -

  KB Brookins

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  KB Brookins
  KB Brookins, a Black American writer with brown skin, poses with their hands in their pockets. They are wearing a pink shirt, blue jeans, and a Black belt. The background is purple and green.
  KB Brookins, Black American writer
  Born August 28, 1995 (age 29)
  Fort Worth, Texas, U.S.
  Occupation Writer
  Education Texas Christian University (BA)
  University of Texas at Austin (MFA - in progress)
  Genres Poetry, Creative Nonfiction
  Notable works Pretty: A Memoir (2024), Freedom House (2023), How To Identify Yourself With a Wound (2022)
  Notable awards National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, Stonewall Book Awards Barbara Gittings Literature Award
  Website
  www.earthtokb.com
  KB Brookins (born August 28, 1995) is a Black American author, poet, creative nonfiction writer, and visual artist. Brookins is a 2023 Creative Writing fellow with the National Endowment for the Arts[1] and the author of three books: How To Identify Yourself with a Wound,[2] Freedom House,[3] and Pretty: A Memoir[4][5].

  Early life and education
  Brookins was born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas.[6] They first became interested in poetry in 7th grade after a teacher introduced them to the genre.[7] They started writing their own poetry in high school.[8]

  Brookins attended Texas Christian University and graduated in 2017.[9]

  Career
  Brookins received the 2022 Treehouse Climate Action Prize from the Academy of American Poets for their poem "Good Grief".[10] Their poetry chapbook How To Identify Yourself with a Wound won the Saguaro Poetry Prize and a Writer's League of Texas Discovery Prize.[11][12] It was also selected as a 2023 Stonewall Honor Book Award through the American Library Association. [13]

  Freedom House explores themes of race, transgender identity, and gentrification among others.[14] Vogue called their writing style in the book "urgent and timely while still holding space for the possibility of a life lived on one’s own terms."[15]Karla J. Strand of Ms. included it in "the best poetry of the last year".[16]Freedom House won the 2024 Stonewall Book Award Barbara Gittings Literature Award and an award with the Texas Institute of Letters.[17] Freedom House was named a best book of 2023 by Autostraddle, Texas Observer, and Chicago Review of Books.[18][19][20][21]

  Pretty has gotten favorable reviews in Kirkus among other venues.[22] Brookins worked as a Program Coordinator at The University of Texas at Austin’s Gender and Sexuality Center.[23][24] Brookins founded two nonprofit organizations in Austin, Texas: Interfaces [25][26] and Embrace Austin.[27] Brookins stated that Interfaces started "as a response to 'a serious problem with accessibility' of all kinds, including physical and financial, in the literary and arts events they attended in Austin."[28]

  Brookins is the subject of a documentary that premieres at the 2024 BFI Flare: London LGBTIQ+ Film Festival.[29] Brookins turned their book Freedom House into an art exhibit, which premiered in Austin, Texas in April 2024.[30]

  Works
  Books
  —— (2024). Pretty. Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 9780593537145.[31]
  —— (2023). Freedom House. Deep Vellum. ISBN 9781646052639.[32]
  —— (2022). How To Identify Yourself With a Wound. Kallisto Gaia Press. ISBN 9781952224133.[33]
  Poems
  —— (March 2023). "My therapist called it climate despair". Poetry Magazine.[34]
  —— (March 2023). "Notes After Watching the Inauguration". Poetry Magazine.[34]
  —— (March 2023). "Snake Plant". Poetry Magazine.[34]
  —— (March 2023). "T Shot #9: Ode to my Sharps Container". Poetry Magazine.[34]
  “T Shot #5: Ode to My Sharps Container” (republished). Metro Weekly. 2023
  "Remix #2". Kenyon Review. 2023[35]
  "What's On Your Mind, KB?". Cincinnati Review. 2023[36]
  "Love Machine". Split This Rock. 2023[37]
  “Good Grief”. Academy of American Poets (Poem-A-Day). 2022[38]
  "Poem Against Black ____ Magic". Poetry Northwest. 2022[39]
  “KB’s Origin Story”, “Yebba’s Heartbreak”. Electric Literature. 2022[40]
  “& Somehow, Men Are Nicer to me Now”. American Poetry Review. 2022[41]
  Essays
  “KB Brookins on T Shot #4”. Poetry Society of America. 2023[42]
  "Freedom House: A Sonic Bibliography". Oxford American. 2023[43]
  "Trans Texans Are Being Surveilled, This Is Everyone’s Issue". Autostraddle. 2022[44]
  "How Kendrick Lamar Stumbles Toward Queer And Trans Allyship On 'Auntie Diaries'". Okayplayer. 2022[45]
  "This Is What It's Like Going To The Gynecologist When You're Black, Trans And In Texas". HuffPost. 2022[46]
  "Why Coming Out to My Family Isn't on My Holiday To-Do List". Teen Vogue. 2021[47]
  Zines
  —— (2023). Nothing Was the Cause of Their Deaths. Winter Storm Project. ISBN 9798218222475.
  —— (2021). A New Relationship to Pain. LibroMobile. OCLC 1296956995.[48]
  —— (2019). In Another Life.[49]
  Art Exhibits
  Freedom House: An Exhibition. 2024[30]
  In Anthology
  Emerge: Lambda Literary 2018 Fellows anthology. Lambda Literary Foundation. 2019. ISBN 9781799248040.
  Edited
  Winter Storm Project: Austin, Texas Artists on Winter Storm Uri. Winter Storm Project. 13 February 2022. ISBN 9780578361123.
  Awards and fellowships
  2018 Lambda Literary Foundation Writer’s Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices Fellow (Poetry)[50]
  2021 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow (Poetry) [51]
  2022 Academy of American Poets Treehouse Climate Action Prize Recipient [52][10]
  2022 Western Illinois University Fred Ewing Case and Lola Case Writer-in-Residence[53]
  2022 Writer's League of Texas Discovery Prizer Winner - Poetry[12]
  2022-23 Civil Rights Corps Poet in Residence[54]
  2023 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow[55]
  2023 Stonewall Book Award Honor Book[56]
  2023 Texas Institute of Letters Award[17]
  2024 Stonewall Book Award Barbara Gittings Literature Award for Poetry[18]
  Personal life
  Brookins moved to Austin, TX in 2018.[2] Brookins identifies as non-binary and uses they/them pronouns.[57] They currently are a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin.[58]

• Poetry Foundation - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/k-b-brookins

  KB Brookins
  B. 1995

  Share
  Headshot of KB Brookins
  Photo by Kale Garcia
  KB Brookins (they/them) is a Black, queer, trans writer; a cultural worker; and an artist from Texas. They are the author of How to Identify Yourself with a Wound (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022), winner of the Saguaro Poetry Prize and an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book in Literature, and Freedom House (Deep Vellum, 2023). Their writing appears on Poets.org and the Poetry Society of America website, in HuffPost and Poetry magazine, and in other outlets. They are a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow.

• Austin Chronicle - https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/qmmunity/2022-12-17/taking-a-tour-of-freedom-house/

  Taking a Tour of Freedom House
  Poet KB Brookins talks their new full-length book Freedom House
  By James Scott, 9:30AM, Sat. Dec. 17, 2022
  printwrite a letter
  KB Brookins, author of Saguaro Poetry Prize winning How to Identify Yourself With a Wound, has been building a new space for their poetry. Through lessons and tools learned in their work as a prolific writer and workshop facilitator, and as a queer Black trans Texan, Brookins has built Freedom House, a full-length book of poetry.

  Courtesy of KB Brookins
  Preorders for Freedom House are open, and available for purchase on multiple platforms including local booksellers like BookWoman and Black Pearl Books. Ahead of Freedom House’s April 2023 release date, I caught up with Brookins about their new work.

  This interview has been edited for clarity and length

  Austin Chronicle: How did the writing of this new full length book Freedom House differ from the collecting and writing of How to Identify Yourself With a Wound?

  KB Brookins: So How to Identify Yourself With a Wound, it's considered a chapbook, right? Smaller book of poems, 30 pages of poems, specifically. That was a process that I think was culminated over a number of years. But I didn't really know it was a book for a long time. I was just writing poems, you know, first as a hobby. I didn't consider myself a quote unquote poet in the professional sense, probably until, like, 2018. Right. Around that time, then I was like, oh, okay, I can, you know, do the whole book thing, started, you know, putting together poems that I thought we're talking to each other. And really, it was a iterative, on and off, starting and stopping process from 2018 to 2021.

  When I moved to Kallisto Gaia Press, [How to Identify] was at it's more finished state, [and they] ended up accepting it and having it win their Saguaro Poetry Prize contest. But it was a lot of starting and stopping because I had to gain confidence in myself as a writer, and really figure out what it meant to be a poet, like, what it meant to me to be a poet, what themes I wanted to talk about … first book has a lot of kind of pressure, because it's like your first debut to the world in a lot of ways. I had poems out there, obviously, before that book came out, but I hadn't had any culminated into one bound book that a press believed in enough to invest resources to. So yeah, that was a very long process, really, because I had to get over a lot of, I guess, impostor syndrome, and had to also figure out what are my themes? Like, what do I have to say.

  With Freedom House, I think I was a bit more confident … In 2018, I did this workshop titled Freedom Houses, which was about the kind of colliding of poetry and social justice. I was just like, “Okay, what would it look like if art was an integral part of our social justice, our movement work?” I was talking to a number of people who are organizers and also writers. So it [was] just like, how do we merge these both a bit more artfully, a bit more tactically, and talking about the history of art? That is a part of social justice movements, you know, a lot of people look at the Black Arts Movement and other kinds of movements that incorporate art.

  So yeah, it first was just a workshop that I was doing. Then it kind of turned into a book afterward when I was like, oh, again, like, what do I have to say and, now that I have that first book pressure off of me, maybe I feel like I have more license to say it. So a majority of Freedom House was written probably in like a month and a half. It is definitely, probably close to three times bigger than How to Identify. A lot of those themes that are covered like abortion, climate change, growing up black and queer in Texas, transitioning, those kinds of things that I cover in Freedom House. They had already been at the forefront of my mind; I had already written about them before. So I felt a lot more confident to just trust my instincts with this book. Probably 75% of it was [written] just like over a month and a half, and then other poems were either poems I wrote after that March to June 2021-ish period, or before like poems that I wrote years ago, dating back to something like 2018 and then like added kind of retroactively.

  AC: I'm curious with the title Freedom House and having read a few interviews from you before, where you sort of talk about that the house is metaphor in how you're approaching it, can you tell me a little bit about the decision to title it Freedom House and what that means to you?

  KB: I wanted to have a kind of three prong project. The book is talking about systemic freedom, as well as internal and interpersonal freedom. Really, my first big guiding question is, how do I mesh all three of these together? Oh, well, I said “freedom house” in this workshop and this seems to really resonate with participants. So why don't I use the metaphor of the house, like a living room, a bedroom? The chapters in [Freedom House] are named after different kinds of areas in a house, and what happens in a bedroom versus a kitchen versus a living room versus a foyer, like, when you start to enter a room versus when you are in a more intimate bedroom type space. Then that served as a guiding posts for the poems.

  Because I already was writing a lot about transition, specifically starting the process of medical transition through the pandemic, and I was also writing a lot about family, and the hard process of coming out to family or your family seeing you in a specific way and the hardness of trying to get them to see you in a different way, which is your way, which is the way that you kind of have always been. I thought a house was just the most all-encompassing for that. I think about my house growing up, like the kitchen was where all of the kind of big debates happened, right? Like, political debates, so like, if I have poems that are doing this, it makes sense to put them in this [kitchen] section. … So really the house structure served as a guidepost for the themes that I was exploring throughout the collection, because I thought of each of the rooms as places where I could play, if that makes sense.

  AC: It makes total sense. I'm interested in, you said, it's talking about freedom, both in the sense of like, systematic freedoms, and personal and interpersonal freedom. And I think that's an interesting concept to look at, especially in terms of transness.

  KB: I think, at least for me, when I define freedom for myself, and like, what does freedom mean to me as a person, I mean, transness has gotten me at least close to that. Even if the world is kind of topsy turvy upside down, at least I have the personal freedom to be myself, and to change my expression and to change different things about me in order to stay more closely to how I see myself. I definitely think of transness as a freeing thing and also freeing my mind of previously conceived notions of gender I think has been a process that I've been trying to document through this book and trying to document online in different ways. And I hope that when people read those sections of the book, they really understand transness. I mean, the rhetoric around transit is really bad right now, but transness is not some, I don't know, what people are saying, like cult or something. It's like, people are just trying to exist in ways that keep their mental space safe. And we'd like you to see us as we see ourselves, right? I hope it really resonates with trans people who feel the same way and anybody else that reads the book as well, cis folks like just have a bit more of a glare into the trans experience.

  AC: Have you felt like your approach in writing about subjects like transness, and anti-Blackness, has your approach to talking about those topic differed from the chapbook to this longer, more metaphor based book?

  KB: I don't know that they differed, necessarily. I think I've gotten much more brave with saying maybe potentially objectionable things meaning like, in Freedom House, I feel like I say, like, cops are killing us. And also like, hey, you know, being anti-trans doesn't make any fucking sense. I just straight up more things. And I also think that, between the time that I wrote the chap book, and the time that I wrote Freedom House, I grew a lot as a poet. So I learned a bit more about the history of poetry, the conventions of poetry, what is possible with poetry form, and rhythm. I'm a very, I would say, rhythm based poet. So I feel like this Freedom House is an example of how I've grown as a writer, because I'm talking about similar themes as the chapbook. But I think this book is a bit more mature, like, shows a maturity for me as a writer, not at all bad to my chapbook, but literally the goal is as you grow as a person, you would ideally also be growing in your craft as a writer. I've read a lot since then. I've even like learned more about myself since then. A lot of with the chapbook, I was only just beginning the steps of transition. I've just learned more things about myself, learned more things about how people perceive me differently now, all of those kinds of things. So I think there is a growth.

  AC: Is there anything else that not covered by the questions that you want folks to know or that you want to talk about?

  KB: I want to do a pitch for why to buy this book. So, I think people should buy this book because, I mean, it's my life's work, obviously. But outside of that, if you're trying to have discussions and conversations about what it means to be trans in America, what it means to be Black in Texas, abortion, climate change: I have a poem in there about Texas Winter Storm Uri. I have poems in there about police brutality. I have poems in there about masculinity and what it means to be an ally to different non-masculine folks. I have poems in there about being a survivor, poems in there about disability, like, it's a lot of stuff. I think it's a good read for anyone that's looking to understand what freedom looks like, in America, what freedom looks like for trans people, what freedom looks like for Black people. If you also want some pick me ups, I got, you know, though these are heavy topics, I've also got some joyful poems in there. So yeah, definitely pick it up. It would mean a lot to me. Gift it to other people who may share similar identities as me and want to see themselves reflected in literature.

  Freedom House is currently available for preorder through a variety of booksellers, as well as directly from publisher Deep Vellum. It will be officially released on April 11, 2023. Find updates, previous published work, and preorder links on KB’s website, earthtokb.com.

• Electric Literature - https://electricliterature.com/freedom-house-kb-brookins-poetry-collection-interview/

  The Fight for Freedom Starts With How We Treat Ourselves and Others
  KB Brookins' poetry collection "Freedom House" is a manifesto and rallying call for Black trans liberation

  Jan 18, 2024
  Joss Lake
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  In Freedom House, KB Brookins uses language to imagine Black liberty in personal, political, and public spheres. Through inventive forms, such as a CV and a poem written after playing Lil Nas X’s “MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)” thirty times, Brookins’ expansive poetry collection expresses a longing for messy and unconstrained selfhood.

  They are potent calls both inward and outward, weaving between the many textures of pleasure and rage. Brookins cruises through a range of registers, speaking directly and lyrically about harm and resistance. Everything is fair game: Will Smith’s slapping of Chris Rock, revelations about being read as male, an imagined Black future with comfort, care, and ease.

  This book is a container for the multitudinous sides of a complex voice, bringing the reader into a home where a Black trans poet’s self, along with their legacies and visions of the future, is able to unfurl.

  Joss Lake: What are the essential components of building a “freedom house” in your work and in the world?

  KB Brookins: A lot of the poems are about my personal journeys with things like masculinity. And transitioning is really important to me to be like an invisible trans person right now, because nationwide we’re a lot of places. 44 out of 50 states have at least one piece of legislation that they’re totally advanced this year that is anti-trans in nature. So it’s a lot of misinformation, a lot of people being fearful of what they don’t actually understand. I talk a lot about my personal experience as a Black trans person living in Texas, living in the United States, North America in general, and being trans, and what that feels like right now and how because we live in such a place that really discourages people from being who they are.

  So it starts personal: Who are you and how much of you is influenced by what you’ve been told versus who you actually are? And then I think it’s interpersonal, like how we treat each other. You have to [think about that] before you can say “abolish the police”, for example. You actually have to be practicing that principle in your everyday life, like how you treat yourself and also how you treat others. And how do you get through things like conflict; how do you show up in romantic or physical encounters. Those are questions that I was thinking through and writing through in the book.

  And then, of course, there are the circumstances in which we live in on a national and global scale that are unnatural. It is unnatural for the climate to be changing at the rate that it is changing. And whether you live or die every day comes down to your race. It’s very unnatural for people to be so invested in things that at the end of the day don’t bother anybody, like someone being trans, like someone being queer. And it’s also just unnatural to have police and militant people who carry guns around. And it’s unnatural to have the law dictate things like putting the Ten Commandments up on every school in a state, which is an actual piece of legislation that’s trying to be passed in my state. I want to talk about these things very clearly, and I find poetry to be the best medium in which I can talk about them. Because poetry makes space for audaciousness and makes space for exploring things, maybe, in a way like you and me are talking right now. So I’m using things like metaphor, I’m using things like simile, I’m using things like repetition in rhyme and even form, ripping off the form of the curriculum vitae or ripping off the form of a legal document in order to have a conversation with a reader.

  JL: A really beautiful aspect of this book is that we can move through these different layers and it doesn’t feel like anything is left out. I’m curious about how you went about organizing this vast container. How did you decide on the architecture?

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  How much of you is influenced by what you’ve been told versus who you actually are?

  KB: Let’s say, a bedroom space in which you’re having more sensitive things that you may not have in an open space, like a kitchen. You walk into someone’s house and then they’ll say like, oh, you got to take your shoes off. Or like, here’s the chandelier and here’s how the kitchen is. I was using that section as an orienting space, introducing some of the themes that will be constant throughout the book. I was thinking of bedroom spaces not necessarily where the more internal dialogue poems happen, but maybe more of those [dialogues] are in the kitchen. A lot of intense intergenerational conversations happen at the kitchen table in my family. So I was really thinking: how do those rooms function in a house and how can I display that through the poems that are in those sections?

  JL: I was struck how, in another interview, you were naming the trees in your neighborhood and talking about how you commune with them. How did you come to sort of know the names of the trees and plants around you? I’ve been thinking about how we’ve lost touch with our surroundings.

  KB: If I was to make my KB school, it would definitely be a class there in which you just learn about your local environment. People think that being vegan will save the world, right? But I think actually eating local, would eliminate a lot of the carbon footprint. And most people live in a place in which they can forage in their local area. It’s really important to be in tune with what is happening around you naturewise. We owe it to the things that live that are not just human, to care for and be in communion with those things. Growing up there’s an element of nature where I think a lot about: time and who has the actual time to be outside versus who doesn’t. When I was growing up, when people would be so “pro-nature,” they would always be white, right? So I would just be like, “That’s some white shit.” And then I realize—as I grow up and learn more about the environment and about the history of environmental racism—this is very ingrained in non-white folks, that nature is not for us.

  There never was a time when I was growing up where at a certain time in the year my family didn’t go and take pecans from a pecan tree. And we always had these big bags of pecans that we picked from a specific area. And also my family went to this big family reunion every year in Waco, Texas, and I saw all these different kinds of trees and the elders that lived in that area knew what those trees were.I was always given little bits of nature.

  Then I got older and people have their section of gays, right? The “artsy gays”, the “theatre gays,” and when I moved to Austin, somehow, I got enveloped into the “nature gays.” My fiancé used to be an environmental educator and one way I got oriented here was walking around the neighborhood and her being able to name every tree. I learned a lot about my local landscape from her and other people who are invested in keeping that knowledge alive.

  JL: Are there ways that you help yourself refocus on your intended audience and away from an oppressive white gaze, or is that naturally happening for you?

  KB: In the late 2010s, all of a sudden, people were paying attention to writers of color. And the things that people were gravitating towards were always about Black abjection or like some person of color talking about their trauma and the trauma of their experience of being whatever race it was that they were. And it was just interesting because the assumed audience would always be white people that didn’t understand where they were coming from. And I wonder where that impulse came from. I found myself, once I started taking myself more seriously as a writer, when I started getting critiques, it’d be like, “I don’t understand it. So you should change it.” What is this assumption that like I could be reading Walt Whitman and you love him and you don’t want him to explain things, but you want me to explain things. We’re reading Robert Frost and John Ashbery, which are not easy reads. Robert Frost is like “Great monolithic knees.” And you’re like, “I can work with that.” That doesn’t make sense. You’re cool with that and you’re cool with figuring that out in class, but you’re not cool with me, making a reference to my hometown that people who I’m actually writing this for will understand? And people don’t have to be from my hometown to understand some of these things because Google is free, right? If you really want to know, you could just Google it. And that’s what I do when I come across texts that I don’t understand, I just Google it, right? So or use context, close textual contextual observations. We learn that in close reading, right? But there’s an expectation in which writers of color just hand-hold and write for people that are not themselves and that aren’t in their communities.

  JL: Can you talk more about this impulse to include so many different textures and layers of existence. We experience this sense of self in such a vast and almost encyclopedic way. Can you talk about the impulse to pull everything into your work?

  KB: If I’m going to address a subject matter so large and also so mulled over as freedom, I have to bring in everything, right? And if I’m going to take it from a three-pronged lens of personal, interpersonal, systemic, I have to bring in all of the things that that might include. I’m talking about race. I’m also talking about gender and sexuality, because that’s my existence, right? We can’t really escape our context. Even if I was to write like a sci-fi book, those things would still come in. And then also talking about disability and trying to develop a speaker, I’m like, okay, is it autobiographical? Is it not? That’s kind of up to you to decide, right? It had to be like a book with a very large view. And then also, that’s just how my mind works and how these large concepts like racism work—it’s permeated within the books we pick up and don’t pick up. They get made and don’t get made. And in the environment that we see or don’t see and the interactions that we can and can’t have.

  There’s an expectation in which writers of color just hand-hold and write for people that are not themselves and that aren’t in their communities.

  It made sense to riff off of forms. When approaching things like a CV, I’m like, “Well, what if we were really honest about what that experience at that one random nonprofit that we worked at was. What if we were more serious about and honest about what it means to be a worker or a laborer in today’s late stage capitalism and also, what are those hidden labors?” At the end of the day, our work is emotional labor and the labor of “I just found out that someone that looks exactly like me, died in another place due to police violence. And I’m still clocked in and I still have to be clocked in.” Those large things that feel small in the moment that we have to put up with in order to continue on. Because we live in such a place where you have to prove your housing or you have to earn things like water and all of the things that we actually need to live, we have to work for and like. If I want to talk about that, why wouldn’t I literally just put it in a CV, right? Mission accomplished.

  JL: You write in “T Shot # 4,” “I want the black boy in need to be a river you can’t name even if you send sounds underwater.” Can you talk about the freedom that that can be found in illegibility or if you have a different way of relating to that particular line?

  KB: I didn’t feel tapped into what a Black boy or Black man’s experience might be until I started transitioning. For Black men and for people who are perceived as Black men like me, there is this hyper visibility. There is a large history of a weird relationship with wanting to emulate whatever that we’ve learned through colonialism. And then there’s also this hyper visibility of everyone [outside of your community] seeing you either as a fetish or a threat.

  This is the conversation on TikTok and Twitter where people are stealing from Black culture and not citing Black people, but making money based off of things like AAVE, Black food that started in African and Black American traditions and, slang. It’s “Twitter” slang now or “Internet” slang. But no, it’s specifically AAVE and you just took it, right? And then when it really comes down to it, you know, that white rapper or that white lady singing like Drake rap lyrics doesn’t actually want the experience of Blackness. Because the experience of Blackness comes with a lot of negativity due to other people’s perceptions due to hyper visibility. I find freedom in the idea of not feeling like you’ve got to be hyperexposed all the time and having a sense of self for Black men and Black people, which is not so corroded with other people’s ideas of who you are and not so accessible for other people to steal and pathologize. That’s happened a lot.

  Science has a very fraught relationship with Black people and we see that still negatively impacting the way Black people maneuver the health care system and other spaces. At the end of the day, Black men die at very early ages compared to pretty much every other demographic in the U.S. I was thinking about how the perception of me changing has led to some very interesting scenarios, mostly where I think that me not being completely happy, completely chipper is seen as me being aggressive. And I want to aspire in this poem to feel like you can be something that you don’t have to explain or display.

• Vogue - https://www.vogue.com/article/pretty-kb-brookins-interview

  In Their New Memoir Pretty, KB Brookins Blends Poetry and Prose to Paint a Vivid Portrait of Black Southern Transmasculinity
  By Emma Specter
  May 23, 2024
  Image may contain Clothing Sleeve Adult Person Head Face Photography and Portrait
  Photo: Mama Duke

  Products are independently selected by our editors. We may earn an affiliate commission from links.

  KB Brookins’s debut memoir, Pretty, is not what I’d call an easily classifiable reading experience; the book mixes poetry into the tenderly and skillfully narrated story of Brookins’s life. There are joyful anecdotes, musings on pop culture, and reckonings with familial and sexual trauma in the book, but at its heart is a carefully sketched-out—and often devastating—portrait of what it means to be Black and transmasculine in Texas, a state that continues to criminalize both of those identities.

  Vogue recently spoke to Brookins about the galvanizing potential of Pretty, drawing inspiration from writers including Kiese Laymon and Ire'ne Laura Silva, queering the Southern literary canon, and helping to create Austin’s first poet laureate program.

  Vogue: How does it feel to be less than a week away from pub day?

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  KB Brookins: Oh, man. It’s a smorgasbord of emotions. This is my first foray into nonfiction; I have two other books, a chapbook and a poetry collection, but this is my debut memoir. I’ve gotten a couple of essays published here and there, but it’s my first collection of nonfiction—and, as you know, since you read the book, it’s also poetry. I’m kind of feeling like I’m at the edge of a cliff and I’m about to jump, and I’m in, like, a little outfit that’s supposed to keep me afloat, but who knows if it’s going to work. That’s a muddy metaphor, but…

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  I was going to ask you about making the transition from poetry to memoir, but in fact, Pretty mixes the two to incredible effect. How did you go about situating your poetry within your narrative?

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  I think the poems came before the prose, if that makes sense. I was a person who believed, you know, Poetry is my thing, and I’m probably never going to write anything else for a long time, and then I started trying to write a poetry book that had the same themes and subject matter as this book. But then I realized, I don’t know…some of these poems are mid, and I’m not liking it. So then I started moving over to prose, because I couldn’t say the thing that I wanted to say in the way I wanted to in poetry. One of the pieces that is in the book is based on a piece that got posted onto HuffPost. Then I put the thing together, sent it to an agent, and the agent sent it to a publisher, and then actually my editor, Erroll McDonald, was like, “What if you put poetry in here?” and I was like, “Bro, why would you say that to me?” When I thought about it, though, and kind of revisited poems that I had written that I felt were failures, I realized, Oh, I think some of these poems are portraying something that’s not necessarily already there in the prose.

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  Were there other memoirs that served as reference points for you while writing Pretty?

  I definitely am a person who writes when I’m reading, and the book Heavy by Kiese Laymon is one that people often compare to Pretty. That makes sense, because Kiese Laymon’s was one of the first memoirs I read where I was like, Oh, this is doing something that I didn’t think you could do in memoirs, because I didn’t see much of people talking about Black masculinity and the experience of being Black and Southern and trying to exist as a Black person in the South. He’s also talking about things that are, by all accounts, shameful, like the ways that you’ve kind of fallen for and even perpetuated toxic masculinity, so I think that influence is there—and of course, Kiese was one of the people who blurbed the book. Other people that I look to…let’s see, definitely Hanif Abdurraqib, because he also does a thing where he oscillates between different genres. I’m thinking of A Little Devil in America; when you read that book, you’re like, are these pieces prose poems, or is it cultural criticism, or is it essays? I think a 21st-century reader naturally wants to categorize something, but Abdurraqib has really made his work ongoing, which I really gravitate towards. I’m also thinking about Brian Booms’s book Punch Me Up to the Gods, which is a memoir that’s largely about the Black gay experience, addiction, et cetera. I wouldn’t necessarily even consider my memoir as linear as some of the ones that I’ve brought up, but they definitely provided a kind of scaffolding.

  What do you think is missing from the mainstream cultural conversation (to the extent that there is one) around transmasculinity?

  I mean, people of color right? Because I think this book was really born out of me being like, I can’t find anything out there about the experience that I’m having. Even when I look on YouTube or when I go to a bookstore or to arts events and things like that, it’s like, sure, Black transmasculine people exist, but you have to actively search, because our narratives are not propped up in the same way that the trans narratives of our white counterparts are. The writing of this book was really me trying to write down something that I’m experiencing, and that other Black transmasculine people are experiencing when I talk to them, but that none of us were able to prepare for because we didn’t have those kinds of cultural touchpoints that our white trans friends do. The dominant transmasc narrative had me thinking, Oh, man, so I grow a beard and my voice drops and then I get all this privilege, when it’s more complicated than that, because my transness comes with Blackness.

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  You write about the current state of political life in Texas with disappointment, yes, but also so much care. Is there writing or art about Texas, or Southern identity more broadly, that you feel drawn to right now?

  Well, right now, I can say that we’re living through a renaissance of Texas literature. The influence of Texas is so strong in so much of the literature that I read, and even outside of the literary space, like in journalism; I’m thinking about journalists like Taylor Crumpton, who’s from Dallas, 30 miles away from where I grew up. I grew up in Fort Worth, she grew up in Dallas, so I read her stuff pretty regularly. I’m thinking of poets like Ire'ne Lara Silva, a really amazing Texas-based poet, who was a 2023 Texas poet laureate. I’m thinking about Amanda Johnston, too, whose poetry blows me away, as well as her advocacy for Black women writers. She’s the executive director of an organization called Torch Literary Arts that’s based in Austin, but helps Black women writers across the globe. There’s also this poe from Houston, Aris Kian, and I love that she be on there using her poet-laureate Instagram to say “free Palestine.” I just love that she’s really for the people. There are so many amazing writers that I’m excited to be writing next to.

  Can you tell me a little bit about your campaign to install Austin’s first poet laureate?

  I think it was in 2022 that Dallas started their poet laureate program, and that was right next to my hometown, so I was like, how does Dallas beat Austin in getting a poet laureate program? Y’all, it’s getting embarrassing. I started doing research about what a poet laureate position does, and it promotes literacy, right? It also celebrates and amplifies an area’s literary community and creates touchpoints for the city or country or state about its history and culture. If there’s a ribbon-cutting for, you know, a new historical landmark, they’ll ask the poet laureate to come and deliver a custom poem, things like that, which I think would be really awesome, especially in the very gentrified city of Austin, where we’re losing culture every day. I wanted this program to give new and old Austinites a way to remember what is happening around us, even if it becomes a Whole Foods in three years. [Laughs.] Also, the literacy rate in Austin isn’t the best—over 120,000 adults in Central Texas can’t read or struggle to read—and a big part of poet laureateship is going into schools and community areas like libraries to do free workshops, which I think is a really big asset and necessity here in the city. I was lovingly annoying people, trying to get them invigorated about getting an Austin poet laureate, and also conferencing with writers and organizations and bookstores to make sure that my ask was reflective of the community, and that just passed.

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  Congratulations! Last question: What do you most hope people take away from Pretty?

  I hope people take away what they need to. Yes, someone can walk away from the book and be like, This is an adoption story, or, This is a story about being Black and trans right now, or, This is a story about masculinity, and I think all of those readings are correct. My hope is that the book will galvanize you into action, because we’re going into an election year, unfortunately, and I think a lot of the things I talk about in this book will be big topics for the future of us: the trans experience, the Black experience, the question of whether we leave this state behind or keep fighting for its youth and marginalize populations. I want to make it so someone is not writing a memoir like this 10 or 20 years from now; whatever will make people act is what I want them to get out of Pretty.

  This conversation has been edited and condensed.

• Good Folk - https://goodfolk.substack.com/p/a-conversation-with-kb-brookins?isFreemail=true&post_id=130068495&publication_id=319830&utm_medium=email&utm_source=post-email-title

  A conversation with KB Brookins
  Transcript from episode twenty-one of the Good Folk podcast.

  Spencer George
  Jun 21, 2023
  Hello Folks,

  First, an apology for this transcript going out a week late—I was moving all last week and managed to contract tonsillitis at the same time, so I admit I fell a bit behind. Today’s full transcript is free to all subscribers—and trust me, it’s a good one.

  I also want to shout out Good Folk Fest, coming up next Saturday, July 1st at the Haw River Ballroom here in Saxapahaw, North Carolina. It’s going to be a great evening, with a showcase of NC-based artists and musicians including Dissimilar South, Tre. Charles, Nia J, 723, The Violet Exploit, 1,2,3 Puppetry, and Papr.text. Get your tickets and meet us there.

  GET TICKETS!

  SPENCER GEORGE: Hello Folks, my name is Spencer George and you’re listening to the Good Folk podcast. Today, I am thrilled to introduce you to writer and poet KB Brookins for a conversation about climate, grief, Texas, the South, the radical power of reimagining, and the role that we can play as artists in envisioning that future.

  KB Brookins is a Black, queer, and trans writer, cultural worker, and artist from Texas. Their work is featured in Poets.org, HuffPost, Poetry Magazine, Teen Vogue, RichesArt Gallery, American Poetry Review, Oxford American, Electric Literature, Okayplayer, and many other places. Their chapbook How To Identify Yourself with a Wound won the Saguaro Poetry Prize and was named an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book in Literature. KB’s debut full-length poetry collection Freedom House—just released—has been recommended by Vogue, Autostraddle, Ms. Magazine, and others.

  Currently, KB is a National Endowment of the Arts fellow; MFA candidate at The University of Texas at Austin; Poet-in-Residence at Civil Rights Corps; and at work on their debut installation art project Freedom House: An Exhibition. They have earned fellowships from PEN America, Lambda Literary, and The Watering Hole among others. KB’s poem “Good Grief” won the Academy of American Poets 2022 Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize. Their debut memoir Pretty (Alfred A. Knopf) releases in 2024.

  Photo by Diana Driver.
  KB’s background in nonprofit management, student affairs, and K-12 teaching informs their cultural work. In a span of five years, they founded and led two nonprofits with friends and community members to advance LGBTQIA+ justice and nurture/amplify marginalized artists in Central Texas. For two years, KB was the Program Coordinator of the Gender and Sexuality Center at UT Austin, where they founded the Black Queer & Trans Collective and co-led the President’s LGBTQIA+ Committee.

  In the realm of artivism, KB served as Project Lead for the Winter Storm Project; curated Do You Want a Revolution: ATX Artists on the Carceral State and Watch Dog: a zine about community surveillance and policing; facilitated a workshop where youth created video poems on policing in Austin, Texas schools (which can be viewed here); and hosted a variety show to raise funds for trans people’s gender affirming care. Currently, their passion lies in public speaking; workshop facilitation; consulting businesses, organizations, and individuals in their areas of interest; and projects that merge art and socio-political movement work.

  This is the kind of conversation that only reaffirms my belief that there can be no possible separation between the artist and organizer— that our work is inherently political, meaningful, and has something to say. I hope you enjoy this conversation.

  Photo by Diana Driver.
  SPENCER GEORGE: Cool. Well, KB, I'm so excited to get to chat with you. And even though we’ve had to delay this a few times, I'm glad we get to be here and have this conversation. I would love to start—I know you're in Texas, and I think Texas is a really interesting place in the larger context of Southern cities. Some people consider it part of the South, some people do not. It's kind of this borderland for like, South and Southwest. I would love to hear about what Texas means to you or the way in which you think of yourself in the context of someone who's living and working in Texas or someone who's living and working in the South, or how you've experienced it as a place.

  KB BROOKINS: Yeah, I'm interested to hear some people don't consider it as the South. It's literally the Southernmost state in the U.S. But yeah, definitely. I think that Texas influences my writing as well as, like, you know, me as a person. I'm a very place based writer. When I do talk about a setting for a poem or any kind of piece of writing that I do, it's Austin,Texas, because it's the only place I've ever lived.

  I grew up in Fort Worth, Texas. I lived in Austin for about five years. I had a super short stint in San Marcos, Texas. So North Texas and Central Texas are most of what I know and contain people and things that I love and the people that I've come to love. Because Texas, especially going to state schools you end up around people from other parts of Texas. So I got loved ones from Houston, Dallas, San Antonio.

  It's just a place that I think is often misunderstood in the larger literary community as well as the U.S. I think that people associate Texas often with who represents us at the state level. But I'm like, in what place can you say the governor accurately represents the sentiments of a state? That's just not the case in most places in America because of how fraught our democracy is currently.

  And it's not that Texans are Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton. We're often legislated out of our rights, right? So it's not as easy as going to the ballot box and letting your voice be heard. There are a lot of people who have put laws and put systems in place for us not to be able to so easily make our voice heard.

  It's just a place that I think is often misunderstood in the larger literary community as well as the U.S. I think that people associate Texas often with who represents us at the state level. But I'm like, in what place can you say the governor accurately represents the sentiments of a state?

  So anyway, I think that Texas and being a Southern writer and representing that in all things that I do is very important to me because I want to dispel myths about Texas and Texans and people in Texas and also want to reflect back people who literally live and love in Texas and want to see themselves reflected in literature. And deserve to see themselves reflected in literature.

  And just like in the public space, there's currently a slew of anti-trans dialogue happening in every state in the US. Including Texas. And I think it's important to me that this, you know, trans AF, Black AF, Texan AF book comes out right now, and I put my best foot forward to get it in front of as many people as possible because, you know, there's a lot of misinformation out there right now about who trans people are.

  Everyone is interested in transness, but don't nobody actually know what they're talking about a lot of the time. So I'm speaking from personal experience, speaking from what I have come to know through research and through life about this place that I talk about, this experience that I talk about. And of course, the trans experience is not a monolith, but giving people a glimpse into that so that they can access more empathy and so that they can get to a place of better understanding of transness. And what it means to be Texan then, I think is necessary for me as a writer.

  SG: I agree just so deeply with everything you've said and as a queer Southern writer as well, I spend so much time thinking about concepts of metronormativity and the ways in which mythmaking contributes to our understanding of a place.

  So many of the myths we tell about the South are that you can't be queer or trans here because all the stories you get are often about leaving. So I think the idea of rooting a work in place and doing it in a way that's very rooted in your identity is so, so important, and I'm really excited to see your book kind of go out into the world and get to do that.

  One question I have for you is when you think about Southern culture, both stereotypically in these myths that we build but also the uniqueness of Texas and Southern culture, how would you describe it? Because Texan culture does feel like its own kind of piece of the South in the same way that Florida does. And I very wholeheartedly consider Texas part of the South, but I'm in a Southern Studies program, and I actually said that to someone recently, and they were like, no, I wouldn't consider Texas part of the South. That's a really hot take, which blew my mind a little bit. How do you think about Southern culture through a Texan lens?

  KBB: Yeah, it's a hot take, and it's a wrong take. I don't know. I agree. I don't get that at all because from a U.S. History standpoint, Texas has always been considered a part of the South, and Texas used to be a part of Mexico, which is in one of the Southernmost parts of the Americas. Right.

  And then you also have— I mean, yeah, Texan culture is its kind of own thing in the sense that, yes, we're a very diverse state. We're one of not very many states at this point that have a majority—I wouldn't say minority, but majority— marginalized population. And I think that Texan culture feels very enmeshed in the culture of just, like, multiple different kind of racial backgrounds.

  I like that about Texas. I like that Texas is a place in which food is like so…I mean, it's part of everyone's culture, but Tex Mex literally is just like its own cuisine. And then you have the art of barbecue, which I feel like Texas has really mastered. And then you also have Texan slang. There’s just so much enmeshed in Texas that is unique to Texas that I mean, when I go other places, sometimes I don't even realize. Like, talking to other people and going to a restaurant in New York and being like, hey, can I have a sweet tea, and that being just weird. Or saying y'all all the time. People love to say y’all when I'm out and about. In some places, it's like, I've never heard someone say y'all so much. I guess it's like a compact kind of language in comparison to some other places.

  And then the soda versus pop discourse. I've never said pop in my life. I've always called soda soda. Right. And I don't know, I find it endearing. I find it something that tethers me to Texas. Like the things that I know that are unique about it and the things that I feel like Texas has that a lot of other places don't have because of the ways in which we've had to find a way or make a way out of no ways.

  For example, in Austin, where I live, there's a lot of just interesting queer nightlife stuff. Like you could go to a gay bar and have a comedian on the same lineup as drag performers, who are on the same lineup as poets, who are on the same lineup as musicians. And that's just regular, because we speak to each other and we have this kind of shared understanding of like, we want to create queer space and we're not trying to segment that off by what type of art you do. Right.

  I don't know, there's a level of, like, ingenuity that I don't see sometimes mirrored in other places where it's just like, all right, we got $50 and we got a dream, right? We're going to make this event series happen. We're going to make the community space work because we can't rely on the government necessarily to fund queer spaces, right?

  We're not holding our breath for some LGBT center to be our savior or our safe space. We're going to create said safe space out in public spaces, find those allies that have businesses where we can have space, create digital spaces. I think that I've been a part of a little Facebook group for years where it's like, if I want to talk to a trans person about medical care, I can go on that little Facebook group and talk to someone. We find ways to get shit done, I think, in a way that I don't necessarily see always mirrored in other spaces that have the access and the governmental level support.

  And I'm not saying that's, like, a good thing necessarily. We deserve to have more resources than we currently have. But I think it makes for some of the most dynamic and creative organizing that I've seen before at the arts level. It’s the reason why RuPaul's Drag Races have so many Texas queens, right? It's a reason why when people want to eat good, they come to Texas, right? And in general, the South has made soul food, for example, like a cuisine out of scraps, right? That comes from way back during slavery times of being given so little resources to make a meal for a family, for a community of people, and being able to make something that tastes good, something that feels nourishing from a couple of different ingredients.

  I don't know. I think it's like I love Texas. Of course. I think it's my little piece of the South that feels familiar to me. But I wish that places that didn't know Texas got to know people in Texas a bit more and spent more time in Texas so they could see some of the things that I see.

  I don't think when you Google Texas nightlife or something, like, the things that I'm talking about will pop up. But once you know, you know, and once you know, it's, like, beautiful, right? So just stuff like that.

  SG: It's so well said. I feel very similarly about my own relationship to North Carolina, having grown up here, thinking that I'm going to have to leave in order to do anything with my life, right? And then realizing that activist spaces are really different in other places.

  There's something in the South that is really special and important that shouldn't have to fall on activists and organizers to do it all themselves. But oftentimes it's like you said— that ingenuity and that peace and that community that comes out of it is really special in a way that I find difficult to articulate. So I'm glad that you were able to put it into words.

  One thing that I feel like has infuriated me in this conversation—I remember reading a tweet—and of course, I want to talk about climate and disaster because these are a lot of themes in your work—but I remember reading a tweet about Texas where people were saying, we're not going to go there. Like, filmmakers in L.A. saying, I canceled my most recent movie, I'm not going to go to Texas, I'm not going to support it. There’s ways in which I think in some of these more urban spaces, there's often kind of a backlash that happens against the South in a way that I think can be really damaging to Southern organizers and artists.

  Because now, like you said, when you Google Texas, you're not getting the stories of these communities on the ground, right? I mean, Appalachian labor history is one of the greatest labor movements ever, but you don't get that when you Google Appalachia. And so I think it goes back to what we started with, which is this myth piece and the way in which—I'm also a writer in the South right now, and I see some similar themes in what you and I are talking about, which is that I think we're both really concerned about the myths that have been made. But also, how are we breaking them down and creating these new stories in their place?

  And I don't even want to call them new myths because I think they need to be rooted in fact, in experience and in community activism. And that, to me, is not myth. But it is so heavily tied to these stories that get built up about Texas, about Georgia, about Alabama, about North Carolina. What are the new stories that we're going to write in their place? Because right now it feels to me we're in a moment of like, the South is kind of in this social and mythological breakdown of the stories that have been told are not holding up. And everyone seems to be scrambling to write new stories, I think, on both sides.

  I know which side I want to be a part of writing those stories, but I would love to hear how you think about myth and the role of storytelling in your own work, as well as stereotype. Because I think they're all really connected.

  KBB: Yeah. I mean, I think I'm my best, you know, poet and writer self when I'm able to interrogate and turn myth on its head. A lot of this book, Freedom House, is me looking at things that we've normalized and being like, you guys, this is not normal. It's not normal that we have, like, I don't know, malicious cops in almost every city that have guns that will show up to your door if you say, hey, my car got broken into. That's abnormal to have militarized police in every city, right. It's abnormal to keep telling us that we have a democracy. Texas just spent multiple months terrorizing trans people and terrorizing immigrants and people of color, pretty much any marginalized identity in the name of border security and saving women's sports. And it's like, you say something, but you mean a totally different thing.

  That, to me, is myth making. Where it's like, you have this idea of what Texas is and you're continuously creating this myth, and it starts to break down when you have opposition, so then you kill the opposition or silence the opposition through the legislative body, through throwing out misinformation.

  I try to really defeat and combat against my own apathy and the apathy of others by saying, like, you guys, they're spewing misinformation because they know that the myth that they are making is breaking down, right? And they are working overtime to oppress us at this legislative level because they know the culture is moving forward without their bigotry and without their hatefulness.

  Like trans representation. We're in a moment of trans representation on TV and literature in film that we've never seen before. We're actually moving forward in a lot of ways. It can absolutely be better, but we are moving forward. We have more trans writers in the mainstream and not just relegated to independent presses than we've ever had, right. Yet at the same time, we're doing this book banning. We're doing all of this anti trans legislation. And it's a direct response to the fact that people are being more accepting of things that a minority of people really dislike and don't understand. And they dislike it because they don't understand, right.

  I think it's my job, really, as a writer to continue to poke into these myths that every day I think less and less people are believing.

  I think it's my job, really, as a writer to continue to poke into these myths that every day I think less and less people are believing. It's like this idea of, like, Southern values and those values are just like racism and transphobia and white supremacy, right? And people are starting to see that. Therefore, there are people, the DeSantises and the Abbots and et cetera of the world, that are trying to push for people not having the knowledge that says those people are who they are and they are not good people and those are not good values to be had. And it's time to have new values.

  Some of us already do have new values of community, responsibility, of abolition. And those things are taking off in ways that they never have. I think that there's a lot of fear. The mythmakers, aka Republicans, and some Democrats as well, more than I would like, are mythmakers. They know that the overall world—or our nation in more specific terms—are starting to not trust them in ways that I think haven't happened before. So I don't know.

  I think that I will start to get scared when the opposition is not working so hard to misinform everyone because then they will feel as if they've won, right? When we don't have all of this censorship stuff, then I feel more concerned. But I think we're seeing all of this because, simply put, like, people are scared. Scared of being left behind. And I'm really looking forward to the day where we do completely leave behind all of these things that are not working. Clearly, if you have to oppress someone in order to uplift how you feel and what you believe, then what you believe is probably fraught and not worth believing in, in my opinion.

  I think that in my work, in a lot of the poems in the book, I am fighting absurdity with absurdity in some places, like using very humorous stuff, like talking about Jeff Bezos and using the form of TV. I'm showing you all of these kinds of hidden labors that we don't necessarily think of as labor. I'm showing you critiques of an abortion ban and being like, these are the underlying kind of messages that I see in what's happening right now. Right. Yeah, those are a couple of things. I could keep talking, but I'll stop there.

  SG: I would love to have you keep talking. We're going to continue this. I'm so interested in everything you're saying. To me, it feels like the moment we're in, it's poking holes in those myths, but it's also making sure that as people have the myths that they've bought into, for most of them, their entire lives broken down, we're not just leaving them like floundering with nothing in place. We're giving some kind of new story, or at least community or a level of openness that people can find a community to help write those stories.

  I want to come here to the questions in the description for Freedom House. And to ask some of these questions, which I think are questions that I kind of want to turn back on you a little bit. You say: What does freedom look like? What can we learn from nature and our past? How do you reintroduce yourself in a world that refuses queerness? How can we use poetry as a tool in the toolbox that helps build freedom? This collection explores those questions and manifests a world where black, queer and trans people get to live.

  And in a way, to a lot of people, that feels like a fantasy. Like, a world where we get to live feels impossible, right? And so it's challenging that myth while also rewriting the story. A lot of my own work is rooted in kind of reclaiming Southern Gothic narratives and using that as a space where we can say exactly, as you were saying before, making strange what we have accepted as normal, because actually so many of these things are not normal. And doing it in this realm, in this world where, in kind of the Southern Gothic lens, what is normal is often seen as strange, and flipping that on its head is to use myth in a really radical way and to help achieve that kind of freedom by saying, actually, this is possible, and by writing it into place, we're going to at least move towards that possibility, which, in my mind, is what makes writing so powerful and important and also really radical— especially in the kind of cultural moment that we're in.

  It also makes writing inherently political because you're imagining something that you've been told doesn't exist or that it's impossible to have something like that exist, which the reality is, when you turn to the facts, the South has the largest population of LGBT people in the country. There's hard data to support these things. So it's not unimaginable. It's actually happening all around us. We just don't get those stories.

  I often say, on the page and in writing, I can be free in ways that I can't always be free in everyday life. So why not use that writing as a tool to question?

  KBB: Yeah, absolutely. Yes to everything that you're saying. I think that with this book, I'm asking a lot of questions because I want more of us to feel like, even if there is a lot of forces that are trying to force us not to ask questions, to just go along with how things are, we do still have the freedom right now to at least ask questions. And we should.

  I often say, on the page and in writing, I can be free in ways that I can't always be free in everyday life. So why not use that writing as a tool to question? Because unfortunately, when you question on things like Twitter, someone's going to be knocking at your door the next day, right? If I question in this book and those who get it, get it, then I'm putting forth these kinds of thoughts and this kind of like poking and prodding into public space in a way that I often cannot. And the capitalism of it all, nine to five, et cetera. So, yeah, I definitely resonate with what you're saying there.

  SG: I want to turn a little bit to the ideas of climate and destruction, which are also very rooted in my own work; I look at climate through a Southern Gothic lens. So we'll have to chat offline about all of this, but one of the first poems I read of yours was “Good Grief”, which just blew my mind when I read it. And I think I thought about it for days. I actually want to read a little bit from it here because it's a poem that deals a lot with place and with climate and with landscape and with politics as well. You do an incredible job of weaving these things together. But I want to just read a little bit from the last piece of it, if that's okay with you.

  KBB: Cool.

  SG: It says: A news report said that it’s safe to go back to work. & I listen, because / what else can you do in 6 inches of white. / The snow melted and I still feel frostbitten. / There are no heroes in a freeze-frame changing nothing. / I pose begrudgingly. Say cheese & then write this. / I’m not a survivor; just still breathing. / I remember grief, love’s grand finale. / What else do we have if not the memory of life before this? / I cannot tell you how many lives I’ve lost to mourning, but I can tell you that / the sky does what it does. / Let’s go for a walk & touch the trees that survived like us. / Let’s write a future more joyful & less inevitable in segments of leaves. / Anything we dream will be better than this.

  I just think it's like one of the most beautiful things I've read in a really long time. This poem really stuck with me in the idea that destruction can often lead to regeneration and beauty in ways that are as painful as they are hopeful and creating possibility out of things where we didn't think they were there. It also is a poem that is so deeply connected to climate and to climate change and the role that is playing in the South right now.

  My own work is investigating coastal climate change. I grew up between the coast of North and South Carolina and thinking about the fact that when we talk about climate change, we make it so anthropocentric, right? We make it about us. But like you said, the trees are still going to be there. There's wisdom in these things if we're willing to listen, both listening to each other but also listening to the world around us and finding some kind of common ground in the space.

  I would love to turn a little bit with this conversation to the idea we've been talking about myth. So much of that is also about breakdown and about destruction, but also about these kinds of possibilities of regeneration or at least of a move towards a hopeful future and the role that art can play within that. And I kind of want to leave that open ended for you to touch on, whether it's on this poem and telling us more on climate and the climate crisis, destruction, I want to touch on all of those things. But I'll let you kind of think about where you might want to start.

  KBB: Yeah, well, I can start with that poem in particular. It's so interesting—that's one of my more popular poems now because it was in the Academy of American Poets and won a prize with them, the Treehouse Climate Action Prize. I did not consider myself like an eco-poet by any means before that poem. I feel like growing up, I could say, like, oh, I had this great relationship with the land, but I'm like, that's not actually true. I was working class. I grew up in a working class background and Black. And I don't think that it was necessarily promoted for us to have a relationship with our environment. I think my parents found ways for me to do that by picking pecans with them during every season of the year and having outside time and them really wanting me to have outside time.

  But I didn't really feel tethered to a place environment-wise until I moved to Austin and my now fiancé is, like, an environmental gay. It's funny how people find you, right? So one of the activities that I do to connect with her better is just like, go on walks in our local neighborhood. And because she is just this walking encyclopedia for trees and nature and stuff, I will just point to something and be like, so what tree is that? And she'll be like, oh, it's this tree, and it grows like these kinds of things and X, Y, and Z. And I'm like, man, you should really be a forager. And she's just like, well, I got a degree in environmental science. I don't really think I can forage for real. And she's like, talking about all these different types of sciences that I just didn't know necessarily before I knew her.

  When I met her, I was like, why is it not promoted to us for us to know our local environments? Knowing what trees exist around us, what food naturally grows around us. The way that we interact with food is so, I think, devastating to the climate and all of the transporting that we do that we don't necessarily have to do. I followed this account on TikTok called The Black Forager and it's interesting to me—

  SG: I love them!

  KBB: Yes! One of the things that they said was like, I don't think we actually saved the world by eating vegan. I think we saved the world by eating local. And that just felt so crystalized for me when I met my fiancé and started to learn more about what grows around me naturally and with this poem in particular, it came on the precipice of me finally feeling connected to my environment and then having that environment completely unnecessarily upended by climate crisis. We didn't have to have that happen. I mean, all of the climate crises that we're seeing are due to human impacts mostly, right.

  Texas hadn't seen something like that before, like a winter storm, because we pride ourselves on being like this hot state, right, this state that’s known for having these intense summers and the winters are bland at best, right. But six inches of snow and ice, it's not drivable. A thing to know about Texas infrastructure is we don't have the same infrastructure as that of a Chicago or that of a Michigan, like Minnesota, all that—places that are used to those kinds of climates. So it's like no ice on the roads, no tires that can withstand driving on ice, no power lines that are not littered with trees around them. Trees are falling on power lines and stuff like that.

  It was bad. People were without electricity and water for upwards of two weeks. The only reason why my place didn't lose power is because we're on the same power line as a police station. And every city in Texas all of a sudden had these priorities. They did a thing called rolling blackouts, where some places retained power and some places didn't. And inevitably, because environmental racism exists, the places that were littered with mostly low income folks, folks of color, their power is out much longer than that of the bustling downtown areas and the places that were lucky enough to be on lines for things that they do prioritize, which are police. Police in my city is, like, 40% of our city's budget. They eat up everything and don't help anything. But that's a whole nother conversation.

  Yeah, it was just a wild time. Since I was a very young person I've always been very anxious. And one way that I've calmed my anxiety and learned to calm my anxiety before I was a poet or considered myself a writer or anything is just by journaling. So I was journaling a bit during this winter storm, now known as winter Storm Erie, and then afterwards just fondling through my feelings because I knew any catastrophe that happens, this was going to be the kind of thing that, you know, capitalism and our government will want us to just, like, move on and not talk about. They're not gonna change anything infrastructurally unless they’re bullied into doing so. So I'm just writing, trying to preserve the memory, but also trying to, like, calm down the nerves and the emotions that this continuously moving wheel of capitalism will not allow me to actually feel and feel through.

  It’s like okay, you know that seven days ago, I and a lot of my friends didn't have electricity or water, and now you’re expecting me to be in the Zoom room talking about work shit. It's just, like, pointless to me. But I remember doing my walks with my partner and seeing how regenerated the area already was after so much unnecessary destruction. Like, a lot of trees didn't make it, which was really sad to see. But as time went on, I also saw that some of those were trees that I was like, I don't know if this will make it into bloom again. That was really reassuring to see.

  There are different kinds of practices within the therapy realm, like eco-therapy, where you kind of see nature and allow nature to kind of come into your practice of wellness, like emotional mental wellness. At the time, I was in eco-therapy, so I was also processing those things with my therapist. This poem very much started as a journal entry or multiple journal entries, and then I put the pressure of the craft of poetry on it, and it ended up being that poem eventually.

  But yeah, literally, it's just like I have to see things and I have to write things down and I have to think through things, even if nobody wants me to, because that is the way in which— that is what poetry has always functioned as for me. It's a way for me to see the world and a way for me to reflect the world to possible readers. And a way to come to questions or conclusions or efforts at resolution from the kind of man made disasters that we live through. So that poem is me trying to do that, trying to invoke the knowledge that I have of the environment, trying to invoke, literally, just what happened almost from a journalistic standpoint. And then also using figurative language, using form. I think of a poem that feels in the lineage of this poem, “Not Even This” by Ocean Vuong, which is a poem that—

  SG: That’s actually my favorite poem of all time.

  KBB: Like, it’s very journal entry-ish in the similar way as this poem. Yeah. I don't know. It's me literally figuring some things out despite people not wanting me to figure them out.

  SG: I can totally see the connection to Not Even This. And it makes sense now why I love both of these poems. One thing that feels really important to me as you're talking is it's also about telling the story on the ground and from the voices of people who are there as well. I think there's something to be said that America loves a disaster, but America, even more so, loves to send outsiders in to cover a disaster and then move on in a few days.

  I can't tell you how many tweets and social media posts I saw during this winter storm, talking about how Texas deserves this, this is what you get for voting red, this is a direct consequence of your actions, which is just infuriating. And it goes back to what you spoke about at the very beginning, in that there's also Internet stories here that you aren't being told.

  I think the media contributes to things. I love local journalism. I also, as a folklorist, can recognize that fields like folklore and journalism have contributed to some of these myths in really negative ways. And I think artists have a really important role to play right now in that they can be voices from the ground. Artists are not beholden to the same standards that sometimes journalists are in a way. You know, you can write whatever. Sometimes artists get too speculative. But I also think artists have kind of this really radical power.

  I want to talk a little bit about your work. I know you do some things with Afrofuturism and thinking about the ways in which things like science fiction or even just fiction in general can offer these pathways for reimagining. At the very end of this poem—I have to pull it back up—you're talking about how anything we dream will be better than this, and I am interested in the role that genre plays in your work. I know you're largely a poet, and you've done a lot of prose work as well, but how do you think about concepts like Afrofuturism or science fiction in that element of belief and reimagining?

  KBB: Yeah, first, I especially hate when people say, like, oh, Texas, or, oh, the South deserves this. It's like you can't think that the ballot box is just the one place that exists for people to share their opinions. You just can't think that.

  SG: It's easier for people to think that way than to confront their own biases. It's easier for someone to just blame a whole region than actually deal with the fact that this is everywhere. It's not just the South.

  With Afrofuturism in particular, I think you have to show and display that a future is possible in order for some people to understand that a future is possible.

  KBB: Yeah. And no place is, like, 100% red. Like, do my undocumented friends deserve that? Do my people like friends with felonies who literally can't vote deserve that, have the voting rights, like, unnecessarily stripped of them? Do the people in jails in Texas who do still have the right to vote but voting booths are not accessible to them in jails deserve that? Do literally the biggest cities in Texas, which are all blue, deserve that? t's just, like, ridiculous. I just wanted to say that kind of thinking is really reductive and unnecessary.

  But yeah, with Afrofuturism in particular, I think you have to show and display that a future is possible in order for some people to understand that a future is possible. Because I don't know that we live in a very futuristic time. A lot of us are just, like, going through the motions. I feel like almost every day when I log into Twitter, someone is just like, where are you going? And the answer is, like, through it, bro. I'm going through it. I'm just taking it day by day. I can't think of what happens next year. I can't think of what happens tomorrow. I got to get through today. And that's very understandable.

  I think that the writing that has changed me, the literature, the music, et cetera, that has changed me is thinking about tomorrow and thinking about what we need to in order to get to a tomorrow that's not like today. And the first poem in Freedom House is “Black Life Circle 2029”, which I wrote in 2019, in and I'm like, in ten years, what would be the best situation that black folks could be in that is not today? And when you write that, all of a sudden it feels, like, just that much more possible.

  I think about a poem by Franny Choi called “Field Trip to the Museum of Human History”. It's a poem in which Franny writes from the perspective of children who are visiting a museum. And the museum is set in the future, and they are looking at remnants of the police state. And there's a docent kind of explaining to them, this is what having police was like. This is what prisons were like. And I think that that was such a revolutionary poem for me the first time I read it, because it's like, literally, this could be 2020, whatever, right? This could be 2030, whatever. This could be the future that the generation after me— I'm a millennial— the next one is Gen Z. Gen Z has things that Gen X put forth, right.

  I aspire as a writer to be pushing toward a future and putting works behind that future in ways that make sense to me and supporting those who are putting works behind making that future happen.

  I think that all organizing is kind of like, in a way, and especially black organizing, is Afrofuturistic in some way, because you're, like, thinking about the future, and you're pushing forth a future where you do that, right? I aspire as a writer to be pushing toward a future and putting works behind that future in ways that make sense to me and supporting those who are putting works behind making that future happen.

  Because I think about, like, you had to be an Afrofuturist in the civil rights movement to think about a life of integration. It's not something you've ever seen, right? It's not something that any of those people had ever seen, but they knew it was possible, and they had that imagine in their heads, and they organized with those things in mind in order for that to happen, right? When we see folks on picket lines—the WGA is having a strike right now in order to ensure that these large studios don't continue to gobble up all this money and not give it to any of their writers. It's like, you have to see the foresight of this is possible, therefore, I'm forcing it to happen. In order for those things to come to pass, you have to have the idea that it can happen.

  Throughout this book, in multiple ways, I'm trying to say, like, we have to start thinking about what's possible in order to get out of what is. What is does not have to be how it always is. And there are lots of forces that want us to think this is how it always is. It's like, ICE didn't exist before 2003, right. Every city didn't used to have police. Police didn't always have, like, 40% of a city's budget. There was a time before these things were the way that they were. There was a time before school shootings. I've lived in a time before school shootings. So we know that it doesn't always have to be this way. So continuing to say and continuing to put forth the fact that a future is possible, and I can see that future so clearly.

  I think it's necessary to keep you out of that apathy. It's so easy to be in apathy. But I think it's necessary that those of us who are not just going through the motions every day continue to keep that hope alive.

  Throughout this book, in multiple ways, I'm trying to say, like, we have to start thinking about what's possible in order to get out of what is. What is does not have to be how it always is.

  SG: I love that. It's just like what we were talking about earlier in that empathy is difficult, right? It's much easier to just go around and kind of be jaded and be an asshole and say, yeah, we're going to blame the South, right? We're going to say that all the problems are due to this region. I think it also does a disservice to the amount of people who have long been working in the South as activists and as organizers and who often thanklessly have been putting this work out, only to still be in this moment where nobody even wants to recognize that it's happening.

  Art can be a tool into that, I think. Another huge piece of it, and this is something we talk about a lot on this podcast, is community. You need to be able to build those communities of people who also believe that this future is possible. It starts with one person. But I think it's really difficult, especially in this region in this moment, to be trying to build those futures on your own.

  I read your most recent newsletter this morning, and I love what you were talking about of community and lurking and the idea of being a lurker on the Internet. Do you want to elaborate a little bit more? Tell us more about that. I don't want to spoil the newsletter because we'll link to it, but it was something I felt like I really needed to read right now, and I loved your approach to building community.

  KBB: Yeah, I don't know. All I do on my newsletter is just, like, blab about things that I'm thinking.

  SG: That's what we do here too in every Good Folk newsletter.

  KBB: I'm glad you read that in jest because I'm like, I hate actually entering a literary room and being the only black trans person there. I don't like that. I get nothing from that. So it's also a space in which that newsletter is a space where I try to put my best foot forward to be like, I'm here and I want you to be here, too. I'm going to share what's worked for me in hopes that you take away what's useful and make it your own. I think the thing I love about literature is that there is no pressure to make something like 100% new. All we're doing is ripping off of each other. But making that thing that Audre Lorde did way back when my own KB thing, that’s cool.

  I don't know, all I do is lurk. I think that I wouldn't have social media if I wasn't a lurker and if I didn't have to promote myself all the time because we live in a society. But I think it just means in that newsletter, in that particular section, I'm talking about going to indie bookstores in your town and literally just being curious. Staying curious, I think, makes for a good writer and also a good—I don't want to use literary citizen, that feels so whack, but making for a good literary community member, literary kin. Because we all got to stay curious about each other so we don't get to be jaded and individualistic assholes.

  I don't want to live in a world where we're not reading each other's books, where we're not going to each other's open mics, where I'm not sitting at an open mic where I don't know anybody and just, like, listening to see what I can learn from others on a craft level and on a person level. I tell the story sometimes of, like, I don't know that I knew a lot about the Free Palestine movement until I saw some poems by George Abraham and saw some poems by some other Palestinian writers, like, talking about that shit. And I'm like, hell yeah, free Palestine too. The fuck? That's fucked up, right? I like that art gives you that opportunity. Just because you got up out of the bed and went to that open mic and went to that poetry slam or whatever, or you open that book, you are curious enough to now learn something that you can teach other people.

  I'm always trying to, as a writer, pay it forward as much as I possibly can. I mean, if you're trying to just read my somewhat monthly blabbings on, definitely check out my newsletter. It's a little Substack. It's free. I don't charge people for it. But yeah.

  SG: It's such a challenge to the commonly held perception of art, and especially of writers, which is that we're all just sitting around individually with our notebooks.I think of all the art forms—and I'm saying this as a writer—writing often does feel the most inherently isolationist and the most difficult to kind of overcome that with. I think so much about what does art and writing specifically made in community look like, and how you can transition that piece of being a lurker [into communit6y].

  I felt like I spent years, like, lurking on the Internet or lurking in bookstores or cafes or open mics, and it took me a long time to figure out how to even translate that into, okay, I'm going to go from now being a lurker to being an active part of this community. I do think that's a challenge with it. You have to show up in the world and you have to be curious and be there, but you also have to be willing to be seen by the world and to be a part of it.

  We were talking in a recent podcast about the difference between openness and vulnerability. Like, it's one thing to be open and to put yourself in these situations. It's an entirely different thing to be vulnerable, right? To be the one to go up behind the open mic, to publish your work on the Internet, to open yourself up for recognition and kind of mutual respect and these connections as much as critique and challenge. I also think that's what makes us better artists, and that's what makes these communities so important. And it wasn't until I clicked that piece in my brain and started doing projects like this and just reaching out to people that I feel like things shifted.

  It also feels really important to me in a moment where we are in the South, with Southern artists who are—a lot of us are getting things thrown at us left and right, in a way that you're dealing with stereotypes from people outside the region or in other regions, but you're also dealing with a lot of artists—I think we're going to start seeing a lot of political friction. We're going to start seeing tensions of artists speaking out. I mean, look at what's happening with the book bannings. Community is so important, but how do you get from that piece of, I'm participating in this, to, I am an active part of it and I'm contributing to the community?

  Because when you're growing up—and this is how I feel about it—but when you're growing up thinking, I want to be an artist, you don't really see stories of artists depending on each other and artists needing each other. It's like this great individual genius. So I love the way that you describe it of like, I have to pay it forward, right. I've got to show up for my community and I have to give to it. I really strongly believe that community is just as much about what you give to it as much as what you gain from it. And you can't call it community if you're just going to a space and taking things.

  I'm usually not that person, but if I was to be a writer, right, I had to just tell myself, no one will read your stuff if you don't allow people to know you. And allowing people to know you means going up to that person who you think did good at the open mic and being like, I liked your poem.

  KBB: Yeah, absolutely. I consider myself an introvert. I just really am not that person that's going to be chatting it up with the barista while I'm getting my tea at the local coffee shop. I'm usually not that person, but if I was to be a writer, right, I had to just tell myself, no one will read your stuff if you don't allow people to know you. And allowing people to know you means going up to that person who you think did good at the open mic and being like, I liked your poem.

  Literally, I just would challenge myself. When I moved to Austin five years ago, I came here with no job. So I had all this time to go to all these different open mics and stuff, and I just had to challenge myself to be like, just take some breaths and go up to at least one person at every event that you go to. And if you like their work, tell them that. People like to hear stuff like that. And who knows? That person might be on the precipice of quitting. I've been there before where I'm just like, I could just never write a poem again. I'm kind of done with this. And you don't know how much a pick me up could be, like that email that you send or that going up and saying, like, hey, I really liked your stuff. How can I keep up with you?

  Also going to bookstores and getting to know the people that work at those bookstores. What made you interested in working at a bookstore, and what kind of books do you recommend? I had to learn how to be the conversationalist. I don't know if you've seen Abbott Elementary, but I'm very much a Gregory. There was an episode where he just went up to somebody and was like, we're both wearing the same color, or something like that. Just so awkward. But I had to embrace the awkward, because I've been in so many awkward situations that now I feel like I get embarrassed by very little. Like, the worst case scenario is that they don't want to talk to me. Oh, wow. One person out of the billions of people that exist in the world don't want to be my friend. I'm going to die. It's just not that big of this is not that big of a deal.

  I had to just push myself out of my comfort zone and really, like, chat it up with people in these literary spaces and also ask for what I needed. I know that when I moved to Austin, I needed some kind of writing workshop, because I was just like, I've been a student my whole life. I don't want to be a student right now, and I want to be in a space where I feel like I'm generating work, but I don't want it to be an academic space. So then I found a monthly workshop of writers of color, women and non binary writers of color, and some of those people are still my bestest of friends to this day.

  So just being able to be vulnerable, right. And I teach this thing every now and then, this session called Building Your Platform as a Writer. And the thing that I feel like I get the most friction about is, like, social media and going up to people. A lot of writers are just socially awkward, but I think you got to embrace that. The writers that are extroverts, I envy them a little bit, because I cannot always naturally go up to people and just be that conversationalist. But I think it's necessary, because how do we expect to touch people with our work if we're not allowing ourselves to be touched? Consensually, of course, but touching others is vital. I would be a way worse writer if I wasn't in conversation and collaboration with other writers at all times. I want to be ingesting words from others. I want to be learning what it means to be a writer and person from other writers and people. And I think this book really is a culmination.

  I mean, there are so many after poems. Notice that in the book where it's like, after this band that I was listening to at the time that I wrote this, or after this other amazing writer, I have a poem after Jericho Brown, a poem after The Miracles. I was listening to a lot of Janelle Monet and Solange when I was writing this book, so I think I interpolate them at different points, things like that.

  . I would be a way worse writer if I wasn't in conversation and collaboration with other writers at all times. I want to be ingesting words from others. I want to be learning what it means to be a writer and person from other writers and people. And I think this book really is a culmination.

  SG: KB, I truly could keep talking to you all day, and I really look forward to continuing to follow your work as it grows and expands. We are coming to the end of our time here, and we always end the podcast with one final question, which I will leave open to you to interpret however you see fit. And that question is, what do you believe in?

  KBB: I believe in our individual and collective capacity to change. I believe in good barbecue. I believe in all of our ability to be good, no matter.

  Jericho Brown has this quote in a poem that I just really love. It's like, some of us don't need hell to be good. Right? I believe in our capacity to be good people and do good things without the threats of eternal damnation or without the threats of a gun. And I want us to move towards that in a society where we have the genuine want and desire to be good and we don't have to rely on punitive systems in order to feel safe around each other. Yeah. I believe in love is what I'm saying.

  SG: Beautifully said. I agree. Believe in love in all the forms, all the ways. KB, for anyone who wishes to follow your work, where can they find you and where can they stay up to date?

  KBB: Yes. For sure. So my little section of the Internet is Earth to KB. That's me on Twitter. Instagram, TikTok. That's my website, earthtokb.com. That's my Substack, which is my newsletter, earthtokb.substack.com. The brand is strong, so look me up on literally anything. Buy Freedom House anywhere you get books. I would prefer that you support your local independent bookstore and buy it there. But if you'd like to buy it online, I suggest Bookshop.org or Deepvellum.org, where they do have a 20% off code and the code is, you guessed it, “Read More.”

  So you could get it for cheaper than the retail price if you buy it directly from the publisher, which is Deep Vellum. It comes out officially on June 6th, but you can buy it right now, anywhere you get books.

  SG: Thank you so much for being here and for having this conversation with us. It is a joy and a pleasure to talk to you, and I so look forward to continuing to follow your work. To all of our listeners, wherever you are in the world, have a good day. Good night. Be good. Stay good.

As the Texas legislature attempts to ban books; dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion; and threaten LGBTQ+ people with draconian laws, Texas poet and author KB Brookins' debut memoir, Pretty (Knopf, $28, 9780593537145), arrives when we need it most. Brookins, a Black, queer and trans writer, poet and cultural worker, details their experience navigating gender and Black masculinity while growing up in Fort Worth, Texas, from their biological parents to their adopted family, from classmates to lovers, and from their gender transition through adulthood.

Brookins spent their youth challenging binary spaces and expectations. From early childhood to the present, they have desired to be seen as pretty, and this book is the search to find out what that means for them: "Though not gendered, we often associate prettiness with womanhood, femininity, and objects we see as dainty," they write. "I've never been interested in womanhood, but I've always wanted to be treated softly, like a fat pleasantry to the eyes." Through often striking prose and imagery, Brookins questions the restrictions involved in those associations: "Who taught us that masculinity can't be pretty? Who taught us that Blackness was devoid of prettiness and delicacy?"

While Brookins searches for answers to these questions, they continuously remind us of how hostile the U.S. is to Black and trans people: "As the perception of me changes before my eyes, I realize that it is a specific sadness--embodying patriarchal masculinity in a country that wants your blood more than it wants you to breathe." By describing their movement through the world, Brookins simultaneously critiques the conditions that oppress Black and racialized people who seek radical self-acceptance, and refuses the state's malicious attempts to criminalize gender and sexuality.

Pretty offers far more than just pretty words--Brookins tells their side of the story as an act of resistance against those who would silence them.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 BookPage
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Ortiz, Monica Teresa. "PRETTY." BookPage, June 2024, p. 16. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A793260438/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4e2ca5d4. Accessed 25 Sept. 2024.

Brookins, KB PRETTY Knopf (NonFiction None) $28.00 5, 28 ISBN: 9780593537145

Stories, poetry, and photographs about growing up transgender, Black, and queer in Texas.

"I want to be pretty," writes Brookins, author of the poetry collections Freedom House and How To Identify Yourself With a Wound, who was born and raised in Texas. "Pretty as in the softest form of me possible." In the first chapter, the author describes their mother being told her baby would be a girl. "That was the first sentence of a book that describes my undoing," they write. "That was the first story someone else told for me." Now 28, the author has made concerted efforts to center themself as the writer, literally and metaphorically, of their life story. Despite an admittedly fuzzy recollection of their childhood and adolescence, Brookins describes myriad hardships they faced, including being molested by four boys at church at age 5 ("They are just being boys," one grown-up responded) and losing 70 pounds, over the course of two years during high school, due to the stress of self-denial. This book, above all, offers a potent narrative of learning to live authentically, no matter the circumstances and challenges. Brookins relays their experiences and opinions with candor, usually in a colloquial tone. The author recounts their medical transition and the traumas of the last several years. "Transness is forty-nine lawmakers in forty-nine states wanting your carnages and spirit dead cause you dared to be yourself," they write. The most compelling threads of the text relate the author's journey of self-actualization, from questioning ideas of gender to shedding shame. "My life's work is to make Black people, queer people, and masculine people fall in love with who they are and shed the daily violence of betraying themselves and others," they write. This book is a powerful testament to that.

An inspiring and deeply human work.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Brookins, KB: PRETTY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A788096748/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f3b0f8ec. Accessed 25 Sept. 2024.

Pretty: A Memoir

KB Brookins. Knopf, $28 (240p) ISBN 978-0-593-53714-5

Nonbinary poet Brookins imagines "a world where [they] don't have to be resilient" in their bold debut. Flitting in time between their early childhood and young adulthood, the 28-year-old author recounts growing up as an adopted, church-going, Black lesbian in the Stop Six neighborhood of Fort Worth, Tex., where their masculine interests and religious antipathy made them an outsider. With the aid of pop culture--namely Ciara and Frank Ocean--they became their own mentor, teaching themselves, in fits and starts, precisely how they'd like to show up in the world. Brookins's writing thrives on well-observed juxtapositions: as the author explored their gender expression, they often acted "toxically masculine" even as they ached to be "treated softly"; medical transition helped them come across as they'd always hoped, but they found that others started to see them as a "scary Black man," with all the baggage that stereotype conjures. Linguistically, Brookins pulls equally from playful internet slang and queer theory, often joining both syntaxes in the poems that punctuate each chapter. Though the final product feels slightly underbaked--there's little narrative thrust--the author's dazzling voice and sure-footed perspective manage to hold everything together. Brookins is a writer to watch. Agent: Annie Dewitt, Shipman Agency. (May)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 PWxyz, LLC
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"Pretty: A Memoir." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 12, 25 Mar. 2024, pp. 53+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A799108019/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=61381bff. Accessed 25 Sept. 2024.

LOS ANGELES, CA -- The following information was released by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD):

By Kayla Thompson, Communities of Color Associate June 7, 2024

Late last month, the world received yet another powerful reminder of the undeniable force and importance of Black queer stories in the form of KB Brookins' debut memoir Pretty. A moving and vulnerable foray into what it means to navigate and embody desirability/desire, tenderness, softness, love, and masculinity as a queer and trans person, Brookins' Pretty radiates honesty and authenticity.

Brookins, a Black, queer, and trans writer, cultural worker, and visual artist from Texas, writes with precision and clarity about the ways in which the social construction of gender, toxic masculinity, and erasure of queer and trans identities permeate the fiber of our lives and society, even from our earliest moments. At the outset of their book, they imaginatively outline the story of their birth, writing "'It's a girl,' the nurse said, softly. My mother smiled big, then nodded in silence. That was the first sentence of a book that describes my undoing. That was the first story someone else told for me" (page 4). Through Pretty, Brookins re-seizes control of the narrative, taking back their own story and steering the course of their becoming.

Even as Brookins discusses the complexity of finding and accepting tenderness and softness from partners (and showing that tenderness and softness to others in turn) as they came to terms with their queer and trans identities, they also discuss the difficulty of giving themselves the same grace and care. Throughout the memoir, readers become intimately familiar with Brookins' journey to self-love and acceptance, driven towards understanding through words that underline a shared humanity that everyone can relate to, regardless of your gender identity or sexual orientation: "I wasn't born attached to gender. Just, like everyone, wanting to be loved" (p. 146).

In addition to the highly poignant meditations on love and the self, some of the most powerful moments of Brookins' story come in the form of Brookins' reflections on subjects rife with stress, trauma, and pain. Some of Brookins' earliest reflections in Pretty reveal the difficulties Brookins faced living in Texas and growing up within the Church: "It was volatile, to be anything but small enough to fit in their holy boxes," (p. 41) and "My only sin was being butch, full of questions, and alive" (p. 28). While these statements might initially seem to be symptomatic of a regional failing or misunderstanding of queer and trans people, across the memoir Brookins illuminates how it is a wider cultural failure of society to accept queer and trans people as they are.

Moving even deeper into some of the harsher aspects of their journey, the way in which Brookins addresses the impacts of toxic masculinity on their own life as well as the harm they caused through their internalization and enacting of toxic masculinity is particularly impactful. Rather than just laying out the ways they permitted or executed toxic masculinity, and the violence associated with it, in their own life, Brookins uses their missteps as an opportunity to urge other men and other people to do more to dismantle toxic masculinity as they see it show up around them and as it impacts the people they love.

Still, even while acknowledging the ache of pervasive queerphobia, transphobia, anti-Blackness, and toxic masculinity and violence, KB uses this pain to advocate for a better world: "We must believe people when they tell us who they are. We must create a culture where people's reality always overpowers other people's bigotry. There is no one on the planet who knows more about a person's gender or sexuality than that person does, and the fact that political and everyday bullies team up on queer and trans people to tell them that their reality is invalid sickens me" (p. 102). Through various meditations, KB affirms their own journey, identity, and worth while imagining a future in which the external world and society does the same, saying "I've always been me: fat, Black, queer, trans, and pretty. I deserve a world where I don't have to be resilient" (p. 63).

One of the ending lines of Brookins' memoir acts as a kind of manifesto for reality: "One day, in my lifetime, or in a timeline that succeeds me, in some time that trans people inevitably will exist in, everyone will be treated as someone" (p. 139). It is a ramifying reminder of the strength of hope, and an indicator of the revolutionary power that exists in our stories, the possibilities that open up when Black, queer, trans stories like Brookins' and memoirs like Pretty make their way into the hands of our community.

To keep up with KB Brookins and all things Pretty: A Memoir, you can visit their website, catch up with the Pretty book tour in a city near you, and follow KB on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.

About KB Brookins

KB BROOKINS is a Black, queer, and trans writer and cultural worker from Texas. They are the author of Freedom House and How to Identify Yourself with a Wound. Brookins has poems, essays, and installation art published in Academy of American Poets, Teen Vogue, Poetry Magazine, Prizer Arts and Letters, Okayplayer, Poetry Society of America, Autostraddle, and other venues. They have earned fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, Equality Texas, and others.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 States News Service
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"KB BROOKINS' 'PRETTY: A MEMOIR' AND MANIFESTO FOR THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF BLACK, QUEER, AND TRANS STORIES." States News Service, 7 June 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A796823942/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=38cc3983. Accessed 25 Sept. 2024.

Ortiz, Monica Teresa. "PRETTY." BookPage, June 2024, p. 16. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A793260438/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4e2ca5d4. Accessed 25 Sept. 2024. "Brookins, KB: PRETTY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A788096748/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f3b0f8ec. Accessed 25 Sept. 2024. "Pretty: A Memoir." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 12, 25 Mar. 2024, pp. 53+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A799108019/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=61381bff. Accessed 25 Sept. 2024. "KB BROOKINS' 'PRETTY: A MEMOIR' AND MANIFESTO FOR THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF BLACK, QUEER, AND TRANS STORIES." States News Service, 7 June 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A796823942/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=38cc3983. Accessed 25 Sept. 2024.

• The Sundress Blog
  https://sundressblog.com/2022/12/01/sundress-reads-review-of-how-to-identify-yourself-with-a-wound/
  Word count: 631

  Sundress Reads: Review of How to Identify Yourself with a Wound
  sundresspublications Admin December 1, 2022

  When every social category marks you for harm, you may find it “best to identify yourself with a wound / Preferably before they even happen.” At least, KB’s speaker first confronts pain in this way in their award-winning poetic debut, How to Identify Yourself with a Wound (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022). Spanning two decades across as many Texas cities, How to Identify Yourself with a Wound chronicles one Black transmasculine person’s nonlinear healing journey. These full-throated poems, while wholly KB’s own, capture the incalculable complexities of contemporary survival.

  In “self-portrait as Frank Ocean song about drugs,” one of the chapbook’s earliest poems, the speaker contends with their attraction to “un-out women […] who only see me / with a devil’s sickle resting on their left shoulder.” Their lovers, deeming queer masculinity a corrupting force, retreat into the closet, relegating trysts to car seats and street corners. At the same time, the speaker only pursues women “with daddy issues, unstable self-images, & blunts dipped / in promethazine,” cementing their eventual disposal.

  Subsequent pieces explore similar tensions within the speaker’s other relationships. In “First Boyfriend,” the speaker considers their high school relationship’s relative health in contrast to its age gap and explosive conclusion. However, upon receiving a Facebook friend request from their ex-boyfriend, the speaker observes, “he had three children with / women multiple years younger than me.” Then, in “Notes on Sexual Experiment,” they reengage in sexual relationships with men, goading “love to make a mockery” of their lesbian identity. Nevertheless, their curiosity collapses beneath their discomfort, leading them to excise themselves from their male lovers’ lives.

  As Tim Kreider aptly declares in his oft-quoted essay, “I Know What You Think of Me,” “We don’t give other people credit for the same interior complexity we take for granted in ourselves, the same capacity for holding contradictory feelings in balance, for complexly alloyed affections, for bottomless generosity of heart and petty, capricious malice.” KB resists this easy sentiment with each and every piece. After all, as the speaker proposes in “Pre-Top Surgery Pantoum,” “To be alive is to be scarred & riddled with problems. / To be dead is to give up on ideas for birth.” Here, KB’s speaker recognizes these contradictions in themselves—and extends this understanding to their subjects’ full humanity.

  “you’ll never know what your mother went through” best exemplifies KB’s aptitude for empathetic characterization. Presented in the form of a numbered list, “you’ll never know what your mother went through” explores the speaker’s relationship to their semi-estranged birth mother. In this piece, the speaker notes, “My therapist defines me as a person that mothers all of their partners. I offer selves that I never owned—a name, a tongue, a moment of time—to a partner in efforts to cosplay intimacy.” These cycles of pseudo-motherhood continually manifest in their romantic entanglements, dooming them to failure. It is only through self-acceptance and introspection that the speaker frees themselves from repetition.

  Overall, I found How to Identify Yourself with a Wound to be a gorgeous exercise in candor, a perfect display of authentic existence without surrendering to popular ideals of “authenticity.” I especially admire how even KB’s most morbid moments are infused with hope. In “When the Lights Shut Off,” the chapbook’s final poem, the speaker considers their own inevitable death in the context of lineage and community. Arm in arm, they harmonize with a departed friend, “I hurt but I love you much / I promise / better is coming.”

  How to Identify Yourself with a Wound is available at Kallisto Gaia Press

• Honey Literary
  https://www.honeyliterary.com/stickyfingers/brookinss-freedom-house-as-manifesto
  Word count: 903

  Review: KB Brookins’s FREEDOM HOUSE as Manifesto

  KB Brookins’s Freedom House as Manifesto

  Reviewed by Katherine O’Hara

  Freedom House. Deep Vellum Publishing, 2023.

  To hold history in your hands, pain-heavy but hopeful, that is what it is like to read Freedom House by KB Brookins. This collection is a movement, a world in bloom, a freedom house being built before the reader’s eyes as they move section by section, room by room.

  Freedom House opens with a quote from Kiese Laymon about the possibility of transformation and how such is not possible without “honest acceptance of who you are, whence you came, what you do in the dark, and how you want to love and be loved tomorrow.”

  Brookins, a Black, queer, and trans writer and activist in Texas writes about the opposition they experience while also addressing a hopeful future. The collection physically moves readers from room to room, framing the poems in such a way that readers reflect on how the layers of the personal and the political become more intimate across the collection’s different rooms. Before the reader moves from sections Foyer, Dining Room, Bedroom, and Living Room, we sit with “Black Life circa 2029” at the collection’s start: “I love my land, comfortable; I love this life, loud. / I have a living–/ I have a room.”

  I appreciate the duality here. How the poet acknowledges the importance of a physical space that upholds safety and acceptance while also acknowledging that existence as a whole should be held with the same grace and protections. Not only in the spaces we inhabit literally, but also politically, socially, and culturally.

  Honest acceptance continues throughout the collection from lines “I am becoming / my own best man” to how “a Black boy can be a river [if you let him]” in the T-Shot series of poems. Brookins holds space for where discovery happens: where the heart of who someone is can sink in and just be, showing how one wants to love and be loved tomorrow. How being one’s whole self should be met with grace and not opposition.

  But the joy that can be built within a freedom house is not addressed without the contrast of what lies outside. Thinking back to Laymon’s quote, I can see how Brookins also showcases the atmosphere of “whence you came and what you do in the dark” not only in relation to how one views their own history but also how the United States and its systems function. Brookins does not shy away from the political landscape: calling out gentrification, racial politics, climate change, ERCOT, and white America.

  While whiteness would prefer to hide from its roots, from its inheritance of blood shed, Brookins shines light on “from whence you came,” stating in “Bare Minimum, Or To-Do List For white America”: “Don’t think that–due to fear planted in the roots of your kin–you can’t get rid of yourself today.” And poems like “Ars Poetica with Election Results Still in Limbo,” also address the inconsistencies of white feminism, how the sentiment “difference doesn’t define us” is missing the mark. To not acknowledge that a country was built on the labor and enslavement of Black people, and to ignore the ways this country continues to use difference to instill systemic issues of inequality, makes trying to change these very systems of oppression impossible. Change cannot begin without acknowledgement of the many layers of what needs to be changed.

  For a freedom house to truly be free, it requires protection and hope, yes, but it also requires reflection, for readers from different backgrounds and experiences to face themselves head-on, and call to action how they can be better community members within political systems that desperately need changing.

  It should also be stated, especially when we read Brookins’s poem “I’m Not Writing Anything Else Where white People are the Assumed Audience,” that this freedom house is ultimately one readers from different backgrounds are looking into. Brookins writes “forget rage mistaken as hate forget Defund The Police Is Not Realistic forget Nancy Pelosi & the police forget the bombings & shootings & recanting all this shit so you can feel me less forget the stares forget ignorance assumed of the reader forget mistakes forget writing more like them…” This house is not being built for the white reader and this house should also exist outside of their interpretation, opinion, and gaze.

  Brookins has the ability to leave readers in a sense of reckoning at the end of each poem. The collection ends with a manifesto to live, stating “I think I’m ready to house myself out of shame.” KB calls readers to think more critically and advocate intentionally. Readers can feel this communion outside of shame and into curiosity when attending one of KB’s readings. From Kansas City’s AWP to the Black Queer Emancipation open mic hosted by Ebony Stewart, KB and Freedom House move audiences to consider how we set intentions for ourselves, our communities, and our futures.

  When concluding Brookins’s collection, readers are ready to house themselves out of shame, and, as Brookins states, “once the terrible news gets better, we live.”

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