Details

Pretty a memoir ~ a book by KB Brookins

Winner of the 2025 GLCA New Writers Award • By a prize-winning, young Black trans writer of outsized talent, a fierce and disciplined memoir about queerness, masculinity, and race.
Please have finished the book and arrive with a note or two for discussion.

ZOOM link of Spring Queer Book Club Tea Social will be given to those registered.
*(it will be over Zoom - BYOT ~ Bring Your Own Tea!)
Please email me at RCATX@familyeldercare.org to register.

Book Details
Winner of the 2025 GLCA New Writers Award • By a prize-winning, young Black trans writer of outsized talent, a fierce and disciplined memoir about queerness, masculinity, and race.

Even as it shines light on the beauty and toxicity of Black masculinity from a transgender perspective—the tropes, the presumptions—Pretty is as much a powerful and tender love letter as it is a call for change.

“I should be able to define myself, but I am not. Not by any governmental or cultural body,” Brookins writes. “Every day, I negotiate the space between who I am, how I’m perceived, and what I need to unlearn. People have assumed things about me, and I can’t change that. Every day, I am assumed to be a Black American man, though my ID says ‘female,’ and my heart says neither of the sort. What does it mean—to be a girl-turned-man when you’re something else entirely?”

Informed by KB Brookins’s personal experiences growing up in Texas, those of other Black transgender masculine people, Black queer studies, and cultural criticism, Pretty is concerned with the marginalization suffered by a unique American constituency—whose condition is a world apart from that of cisgender, non-Black, and non-masculine people. Here is a memoir (a bildungsroman of sorts) about coming to terms with instantly and always being perceived as “other”

Our Spring Queer Book Club Tea Social Selection was chosen to celebrate Austin based leaders in our Qmmunity.
Copies both in e-book and audiobooks can be borrowed from the Austin Public Library. If you are unable to use e-books or audio and can not buy your own print book email wbob@familyeldercare.org and one will be provided for you.