KB Brookins
“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.”
“Pretty is one of the most brilliantly constructed memoirs I’ve read. There is not one wasted paragraph or scene here. The language cradles but never ever coddles. Some art just makes you thankful. I am so thankful.”
“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. . . . 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.”
“Brookins’s writing thrives on well-observed juxtapositions. . . . Linguistically, Brookins pulls equally from playful internet slang and queer theory, often joining both syntaxes in the poems that punctuate each chapter. . . . Dazzling. . . . Brookins is a writer to watch.”
“Brookins’s debut full-length collection explores what it really means to be free in America, particularly as a Black, queer, trans writer living in Texas; their writing style is urgent and timely while still holding space for the possibility of a life lived on one’s own terms.”
“As KB navigates burning issues of love, identity, race, and enforced gender, bearing witness to how intimacy can be a battleground, a declared truce, or an Eden, How to Identify Yourself with a Wound is never less than compelling and absorbing: ‘Let me tell you the story of a tenderness the world refused to call / beautiful but it lives.’ The powerful lines, the no-holds-barred voice, and risk-taking candor of these dynamic debut poems make the reader hungry for a whole volume.”
KB Brookins is a Black, queer, and trans writer, cultural worker, and visual artist from Texas. Their most recent book is the memoir, Pretty (Knopf, 2024), which Publishers Weekly called “dazzling.” Their other books are the poetry collections Freedom House (Deep Vellum, 2023), described as “urgent and timely” by Vogue, winner of the American Library Association Barbara Gittings Literature Award and the Texas Institute of Letters Award for the Best First Book of Poetry, and How to Identify Yourself with a Wound (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022), winner of the Saguaro Poetry Prize, a Writer’s League of Texas Discovery Prize, and a Stonewall Honor Book Award. Their writing is featured in Poets.org, HuffPost, Teen Vogue, Poetry Society of America, Oxford American, and elsewhere.
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 has screened at film festivals in London, Dallas, New York, and Seattle.
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.
In an interview with Cosmopolitan, KB was asked about the importance of gender-affirming care: “Gender-affirming care transformed my relationship to love. When I was able to access gender-affirming care, I was much more open to receiving love because that love doesn’t come with the condition that I have to fit into some kind of box.”
Brookins is based in Austin, Texas, where they are an MFA candidate at the University of Texas at Austin They founded the adult Poet Laureate program in the City of Austin, and currently serve on the 2024-25 City Poet Laureate Committee
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