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KB Brookins

writer | professor | cultural worker

The Basics + The Latest

Buy my memoir, Pretty
Buy my poetry book
 
Freedom HouseKB BrookinsPaperbackFreedom House is a poetry collection that explores internal, interpersonal, and systemic freedom. In this debut full-length collection, KB Brookins’ formally diverse, music-influenced poetry explores transness, politics of the body, gentrification, sexual violence, climate change, masculinity, and afrofuturism while chronicling their transition and walking readers through different “rooms”. The speaker isn’t afraid to call themselves out while also bending time, displaying the terror of being Black/queer/trans in Texas, and more — all while using humor and craft. 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.
Freedom HouseKB BrookinsAudiobookFreedom House is a poetry collection that explores internal, interpersonal, and systemic freedom. In this debut full-length collection, KB Brookins' formally diverse, music-influenced poetry explores transness, politics of the body, gentrification, sexual violence, climate change, masculinity, and afrofuturism while chronicling their transition and walking readers through different “rooms”. The speaker isn't afraid to call themselves out while also bending time, displaying the terror of being Black/queer/trans in Texas, and more - all while using humor and craft. 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.
Freedom HouseKB BrookinsEbookFreedom House is a poetry collection that explores internal, interpersonal, and systemic freedom. In this debut full-length collection, KB Brookins’ formally diverse, music-influenced poetry explores transness, politics of the body, gentrification, sexual violence, climate change, masculinity, and afrofuturism while chronicling their transition and walking readers through different “rooms”. The speaker isn’t afraid to call themselves out while also bending time, displaying the terror of being Black/queer/trans in Texas, and more — all while using humor and craft. 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.
Buy my poetry chapbook
 
How to Identify Yourself with a WoundKb BrookinsPaperback"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." "The poems in How to Identify Yourself with a Wound pull no punches. Raw honesty paired with concise language inhabit and fully embody a life shaped by the intersection of race, class, sexuality, and gender. This is my favorite kind of poetry, necessary and urgent, revealing and saving and healing and re-creating both poet and reader." -
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My Press Kit (contact me, bio, headshots, CV, book covers)
‎PRETTY (a playlist) by KB Brookins - Apple Music
Read My Interview in OutSmart Magazine
Apply to be a Fountain Fellow!

Upcoming Events

Nov 14: Poets in Conversation: Jae Nichelle & KB Brookins
Nov 18: Reading w/ St Mary’s College of California (Moraga, CA)

Short Stories

Morning Run - The Barcelona Review
Real Housewives of Hell - The Rumpus
Bitch Shopping - Beestung
Home is a Barbershop - Hayden's Ferry Review

Essays

An Ode to Being Trans at the Pool - Autostraddle
Interview with Sara Youngblood Gregory
Band Camp - The Moth Radio Hour
I Did a DNA Test To Find My Father - Newsweek
I Can’t Bottom Anymore - Autostraddle
My journey through red states - GayCities
Do you wanna move to the bed? - Queerty
“Channel Orange” Taught Me - Oxford American
Coming Out On the Holidays - Teen Vogue
Lost and Found - Literary Hub
Going to the Gynecologist While Trans - HuffPost
Kendrick Lamar, Transness, and 'Auntie Diaries' - Okayplayer

Poems

6 Poems - Poetry Magazine
Hey Black Boi - Trans-gress zine
To Trans Readers - Hopelab
Grave Error - The New Republic
6 poems - Academy of American Poets
2 poems - American Poetry Review
AintNoSunshine_BillWithers.mp3 - Transition Magazine
Ode to the North Door - Oxford American
Texas, No Exodus - Texas Observer
To Those Awaiting Top Surgery - CrayfishMag
T Shot #4 - Poetry Society of America
“Sir?,” “Ma’am?,” and Other Things I Miss - The Rumpus

Listen to my EP

WITH A WOUND on Apple Music
WITH A WOUND on Amazon Music
WITH A WOUND on iHeart
WITH A WOUND on Deezer
 

Free Zines

Austin Trans Resource Guide (2025)
Nothing Was The Cause of Their Deaths (2023)
A New Relationship to Pain (2021)
In Another Life (2019)

Books I've Blurbed

Soulmate As a Verb - Kelsey L. Smoot
The Lilac People - Milo Todd
Other Stories to Tell Ourselves - Vincente G. Perez
Wolf Devouring a Wolf Devouring a Wolf - Cassandra Whitaker
Living Fossils - Loren Maria Guay
in the aftermath - Jessica Nirvana Ram
Until Tender - Sam Slupski
Burns - SG Huerta

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