168. Resisting Erasure and Crystallizing Our Lived Experience Through Memoir featuring KB Brookins
Let’s Talk Memoir13 Touko 2025

168. Resisting Erasure and Crystallizing Our Lived Experience Through Memoir featuring KB Brookins

KB Brookins joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about transness, masculinity, and race, how how being a writer has crystalized their experience and made it legible to an audience and to themselves, turning to prose to say the hard things, the tenacity of memoir, resisting erasure and pushing back on toxic systems, coming at creative nonfiction from a poetic impulse, having patience with ourselves, what we might need to let go of as writers, looking at our work with kinder eyes, the way we treat people because of gender, and their multi-themed memoir Pretty.

Also in this episode:

-stages of grief

-permission to have anger

-when lines for genre aren’t as helpful

Books mentioned in this episode:

-Asatta: An Autobiography by Asatta Shakur

-Black Boy by Richard Wright

-Heavy by Kiese Laymon

KB Brookins is a Black queer and trans writer, cultural worker, and visual artist from Texas. KB’s chapbook How To Identify Yourself with a Wound won the Saguaro Poetry Prize, a Writer’s League of Texas Discovery Prize, and a Stonewall Honor Book Award. Their debut poetry collection Freedom House 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 debut memoir Pretty, released in May 2024 with Alfred A. Knopf, won the Great Lakes Colleges Association Award in Creative Non-Fiction.

Connect with KB:

Website: https://earthtokb.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/earthtokb

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@earthtokb

Substack: https://substack.com/@earthtokb

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/earthtokb.bsky.social

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/earthtokb

Get the book: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/724994/pretty-by-kb-brookins/

Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, Hippocampus, The Washington Post, Writer’s Digest, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her memoir WHEN SHE COMES BACK about the loss of her mother to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their eventual reconciliation was named Finalist in the 2021 Housatonic Awards Awards, the 2021 Indie Excellence Awards, and was a 2021 Book Riot Best True Crime Book. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts’ 2020 Eludia Award and the 2023 Page Turner Awards for Short Stories.

She earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Pacific University, is Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, and teaches memoir through the University of Washington's Online Continuum Program and also independently. She launched Let's Talk Memoir in 2022, lives in Seattle with her family of people and dogs, and is at work on her next book.

More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com

Subscribe to Ronit’s Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank

Follow Ronit:

https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/

https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank

https://bsky.app/profile/ronitplank.bsky.social

Background photo credit: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Headshot photo credit: Sarah Anne Photography

Theme music: Isaac Joel, Dead Moll’s Fingers

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(263)

257. Unburdening Ourselves From Decades of Shame featuring Kim Murphy

257. Unburdening Ourselves From Decades of Shame featuring Kim Murphy

Kim Murphy joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about unburdening herself from decades of shame, her often absent and unpredictable mother, what we owe or don’t owe our parents at the end of the...

1 Syys 40min

256. The Catharsis of Memoir: From Resentment to Understanding featuring Jason Allen

256. The Catharsis of Memoir: From Resentment to Understanding featuring Jason Allen

Jason Allen joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up working poor on Eastern Long Island with an alcoholic father, the threat of different types of violence, his father’s quickness ...

25 Elo 46min

255. The Relief That Comes From Sharing the Toughest Thing featuring Dr. Kara Zivin

255. The Relief That Comes From Sharing the Toughest Thing featuring Dr. Kara Zivin

Dr. Kara Zivin joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about maternal mental health and her own her mental health crisis during pregnancy and postpartum, how she became a patient and professor in t...

18 Elo 42min

254. Writing the Hard Stuff featuring Nicole Walker

254. Writing the Hard Stuff featuring Nicole Walker

Nicole Walker joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about how we talk about current traumas and past traumas in ways that don’t retraumatize us, making our work matter to others, giving ourselves...

11 Elo 34min

253. Getting to the Story Beneath the Story featuring D/Annie Liontas

253. Getting to the Story Beneath the Story featuring D/Annie Liontas

D/Annie Liontas joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about suffering 3 brain injuries in one year and how that changed their relationship to their body and to the world, post-concussive syndrome...

4 Elo 31min

252. Pulling Readers Inside Our Experience with Specificity and Particularity featuring Rachel Weaver

252. Pulling Readers Inside Our Experience with Specificity and Particularity featuring Rachel Weaver

Rachel Weaver joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the mysterious illness she lived with for nearly two decades, seeing 30-40 doctors and spending 18 years in the medical system, the toll ...

28 Heinä 37min

251. Mining Opening Pages for Impact featuring Deborah K. Shepherd

251. Mining Opening Pages for Impact featuring Deborah K. Shepherd

Deborah Shepherd joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the large age gap in her first marriage and having mixed feelings about the love story of her youth, the titillation of secrecy and hu...

21 Heinä 35min

250. Leaning into Bursts of Memory featuring Samina Najmi

250. Leaning into Bursts of Memory featuring Samina Najmi

Samina Najmi joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about growing up under a military dictatorship in Pakistan, the colonial legacy in South Asia, writing about migration, race, and gender, teachi...

14 Heinä 35min

Suosittua kategoriassa Koulutus

rss-murhan-anatomia
aamukahvilla
psykopodiaa-podcast
adhd-podi
voi-hyvin-meditaatiot-2
rss-rahamania
rss-koira-haudattuna
rss-niinku-asia-on
rss-vapaudu-voimaasi
rss-liian-kuuma-peruna
koulu-podcast-2
rss-arkea-ja-aurinkoa-podcast-espanjasta
rss-keskeneraiset-aidit
rss-8-oppituntia-rohkeudesta
jari-sarasvuo-podcast
kesken
puhutaan-koiraa
ihminen-tavattavissa-tommy-hellsten-instituutti
rss-luonnollinen-synnytys-podcast
aloita-meditaatio