KB Brookins

KB Brookins

KB Brookins is a writer, educator, and cultural worker from Texas. KB’s poetry chapbook How To Identify Yourself with a Wound (2022) won the Saguaro Poetry Prize, a Writer’s League of Texas Discovery Prize, and a Stonewall Honor Book Award. Their poetry collection Freedom House (2023), described as “urgent and timely” by Vogue, won the American Library Association Barbara Gittings Literature Award and the Texas Institute of Letters Award for the Best First Book of Poetry. KB’s memoir Pretty (2024) won the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award in Creative Nonfiction, and the Dorothy Allison/Felice Picano Emerging Writer Award.

They starred in and co-wrote Earth To KB, an award-winning film that screened at 19 festivals internationally. Two of KB’s TV pilots have placed in the Austin Film Festival and Writers X Writers Competitions. KB has earned fellowships and residencies from the National Endowment of the Arts, Black Mountain Institute, McCormack Writing Center (fka Tin House), Lambda Literary, the ACLU of Texas, Community of Writers, and elsewhere. Their writing is published in The New Republic, The Moth Radio Hour, HuffPost, Poetry Magazine, Newsweek, Academy of American Poets, Oxford American, Autostraddle, Poetry Society of America, and other venues.

Currently, KB is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Santa Clara University and the creator of Trans News That Doesn’t Suck, a digital series that has amassed over 8,000 Substack subscribers and 1 million+ views across Instagram and TikTok. Follow them online at @earthtokb.