KB Brookins Writes Their Way Forward in ‘Pretty’

“For Texas, and all my bois who didn’t get to be boys”: an honest, sweet dedication written by poet and author KB Brookins for their bestselling memoir Pretty. That dedication is a testament to the poems, stories, photos, and essays that make up their memoir: honest and sweet.

Brookins fills Pretty with chapters from their perspective, ranging from five-year-old Brookins to the present. Their written memories and recollections touch on their childhood and the experience of learning and unlearning gendered behavior and expectations. Later chapters discuss their transition, living in queerphobic spaces, and their writing as a way to make sense of it all.

Brookins sees their book “in the hands of people that I would imagine reading my work, like other trans people, queer people, Texans, Black people, or anyone who could learn something from what I have to say.”

Brookins considers creative nonfiction as a way to express “how I remember it.” Thankfully, they kept all of their diaries and journals from a young age to pull from. The memoir is an unapologetic collection of poems, essays, prose, and testimony. The titles themselves—“Contending With My Want (To Be Normal),” “There Are Men Around,” or “Sir, Ma’am and Other Things I Miss”—speak to complicated experiences as a trans person in a heteronormative world.

Throughout the book, words and phrases like “terror” or “boy girl” are struck through, showing intentional pivots in thought and rewrites, forcing the reader to consider why the thought was cut out. Ultimately, it speaks to a message the memoir suggests: being trans isn’t a mistake, nor scary.

A Texan

Brookins was born and raised in Fort Worth, near Stop 6. Brookins writes, “Stop 6 was my little slice of Black heaven.”

“There are still things that reverberate like the way that I talk and the food that I like,” Brookins says. “You can’t really escape that.”

Beginning this school year, Brookins is a creative writing professor at Santa Clara University. They use it as an opportunity to teach students the various ways writing can be used as expression, an idea they hold true to their heart.

“It’s aligned with stuff I’ve done in the past,” Brookins says.

The Future

In 2025, Pretty won the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction at the 37th Annual Lammy Awards. This award ceremony honors the forefront of LGBTQ+ literature.

“May many more memoirs by Black trans people, working class people, people who don’t know what’s on the other side of tragedy but are writing their way to it, continue to be written, published, read, celebrated,” Brookins wrote on social media.

Despite the prestigious award, Pretty isn’t the end of the road for Brookins. For them, writing and creating is a verb rather than a noun. “I don’t feel like I’m at my peak,” Brookins says. “I want to bring in my intended audience and those who aren’t in that audience,” they add. “They stand to benefit from what I have to say.”

Brookins writes in their final piece of Pretty, “We Are Not Untouchable,” “I wanted this: Something to make my words feel real. Something that told me I could make a life out of writing poems.”