AUSTIN (KXAN) — Former Austin resident KB Brookins, who moved out of Texas in August, on Oct. 4 won the 2025 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction for their 2024 memoir “Pretty.”
The book covers Brookins’ experience of growing up in Texas as a Black transmasculine person. They also won a New Writers Award from the Great Lakes Colleges Association.
“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,” they wrote in the book, “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?”
In a social media post celebrating the win, Brookins said that it felt “full circle” to be recognized by the LGBTQ+ literary organization that invited him to an emerging voices retreat in 2018.
“May many more memoirs by Black trans people, working class people, people who don’t know what’s on the other side of tragedy but are writing their way to it, continue to be written, published, read, celebrated,” they said in the post. “I am because my transcestors are. I am because of people who gave me, a Black trans person from Texas who made it out the mud, a chance.”
KXAN previously spoke with Brookins in 2024 about their petition to get the city of Austin to create a honorary poet laureate title. That petition succeeded, and the city announced its first in April.
We caught up with Brookins on Thursday, nearly a week after their win.
“I feel really shocked still and also very proud,” they said. “I mean, the road to writing this memoir was not an easy one. There were moments of discouragement; while I was writing it and while I was trying to sell it and while I was promoting it, there were a number of people who just did not see the vision.”
They said that, for years, it was hard to find books that represented their experiences. It pushed them to write “Pretty.”
“I knew it was something that I needed to do just to say, hey, this is my life, and I know other people have lived this life,” they said. “I hope that the things I’m doing with my art today make it so there is no future when somebody can’t find a book that reflects their experience.”
Brookins moved out of Austin, a city they called home for seven years, and out of Texas, in August.
“I have Austin to thank for like the comfortability and the community it takes to like write a book, right? People would like to think it’s like a solitary action,” they said. “And I think Austin, for me, was the city where I was, for the first time in my life, allowed to be like out and proud.”
It was the personal economic pressure familiar to most working class Americans; the need for a job. Their day job is in higher education, a competitive job market with rare openings.
Asked about the recent changes in Texas higher education, Brookins responded that “higher education has been under attack for awhile.”
“I feel like gave me maybe this tenacity, perhaps to be able to face these these moments,” they said. “The first ‘big person job’ that I got was … at the Gender and Sexuality Center at [University of Texas at] Austin, which fully doesn’t exist anymore.”
“Queer and trans students are still finding ways to connect with each other. So I’m thinking with faculty and staff, we will find ways to connect with each other,” they said. “We will create alternatives, because the universities are not funding those anymore.”
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