A conversation with KB Brookins

Transcript from episode twenty-one of the Good Folk podcast.

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.

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. 

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. 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. 

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. 

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 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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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