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?

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…

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?

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.

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?

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…

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?

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.