KB Brookins (born August 28, 1995) is a Black American writer and poet. Brookins was awarded a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and is the author of the poetry collections How to Identify Yourself with a Wound and Freedom House and the memoir Pretty: A Memoir, which won the 2025 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction.
Brookins was born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas. They earned a BA from Texas Christian University in 2017 and later completed an MFA at the University of Texas at Austin.
Brookins's writing includes poetry and creative nonfiction. Their work has appeared in venues including Poetry, Kenyon Review, The Cincinnati Review, Electric Literature, and the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series.
Freedom House explores themes including race, transgender identity, and gentrification. Vogue described the collection as urgent while still holding space for self-determination. The book won the 2024 Stonewall Book Award (Barbara Gittings Literature Award).
Brookins began writing Pretty: A Memoir after seeking transmasculine writing during their medical transition and finding few works by people of color. They decided to write about their own experience and that of other transmasculine people of color who they had spoken to, and later polished these essays for publication. The memoir includes prose and poetry. The book examines Brookins's childhood and young adulthood, covering their relationship with belonging, religion, music, sexuality, gender expression, race, and stereotyping.
In 2025, Pretty: A Memoir won the GLCA New Writers Award in Creative Nonfiction. Pretty also won the 2025 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction.
Brookins is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns.