Bushwick Book Launch: PRETTY with KB Brookins and McKenzie Wark
Featuring Readings by Zora Jade Khiry, River Ramirez, and Journey Streams

Hive Mind Books is pleased to present writer and cultural worker KB Brookins at Starr Bar for the Bushwick launch of their new memoir, Pretty. Brookins will be joined in conversation by writer McKenzie Wark. The evening will feature readings by local writers Zora Jade Khiry, River Ramirez, and Journey Streams.

This event is free to attend, with a suggested donation of $5 to help cover costs. (That $5 can be used to purchase a book at the event.) After the reading, Brookins will sign copies of Pretty. You can pre-order a book through the ticket link below or buy a book from Hive Mind that night.

ABOUT PRETTY

By a prize-winning, young Black trans writer of outsized talent, Pretty is 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.

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."

ABOUT BROOKINS

KB BROOKINS is a Black, queer, and trans writer and cultural worker from Texas. They are the author of Freedom House and How to Identify Yourself with a Wound. Brookins has poems, essays, and installation art published in Academy of American Poets, Teen Vogue, Poetry Magazine, Prizer Arts & Letters, Okayplayer, Poetry Society of America, Autostraddle, and other venues. They have earned fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, Equality Texas, and others.