Brandy Colbert

Brandy Colbert:
I'm a bad liar. I'm really good at telling the truth.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Brandi Colbert is always right. In her books, at least. Her entire life she has been enamored of the craft of writing and storytelling, but as she got older, her passions grew to include hours and hours of research. For real.

Brandy Colbert:
I've always just loved research going down rabbit holes and just two hours later you come up and you're like, oh my God, I know everything there is to know about anteaters or whatever.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Brandy is an author known for both her fiction and nonfiction works. Her acclaimed novels include Little & Lion, which won the Stonewall Book Award, The Only Black Girls in Town, and Point. Meanwhile, her nonfiction book about the Tulsa race massacre, Blackbirds in the Sky, won the Boston Globe Horn Book Award. In this episode, she tells us where she developed and honed her research skills, how she brings characters to life, and why a character by any other name is just not the same character. We'll also hear how she was inspired by the Nobel Prize winning words of Toni Morrison and the not quite Nobel Prize winning drama of Dawson's Creek.

My name is Jordan Lloyd Bookey and this is The Reading Culture. A show where we speak with authors and illustrators about ways to build a stronger culture of reading in our communities. We dive into their personal experiences, their inspirations, and why their stories and ideas motivate kids to read more. Make sure to check us out on Instagram for giveaways at The Reading Culture pod and you can also subscribe to our newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter. All right. On to the show.

Maybe we could start off with your growing up life and what life was like for young Brandy.

Brandy Colbert:
Yes. It's weird when I think about growing up. I grew up in the Missouri Ozarks in Springfield, Missouri. Pretty sheltered suburban area. For me it was difficult because it was predominantly white and when I was growing up in the '80s and '90s, maybe 3% black I think were the statistics of my area. So I had a really great stable childhood, wonderful parents, supportive, and then there was always this feeling of not really belonging where I was. And the only place I could really go to see people who looked like me regularly was church. So we went to church every weekend. And I don't consider myself a religious person, but to me that was just really impactful because of the sense of community that it gave me as a kid.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What was your school life like, your day to day?

Brandy Colbert:
Yeah. I was a good student. I had no choice. My parents were very much like, you're just going to bring home A's. I really liked school. I was a really involved kid. In fifth grade, I started playing the clarinet. I played that through eighth grade.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You were in the band.

Brandy Colbert:
Yeah, I was in the band. I know. Yeah. Just anything I could get involved with. I grew up dancing, so that was separate from school, but that was a big part of my life as a kid.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You were a tap dancer, is that what I-

Brandy Colbert:
Yes. Yeah. I'm glad that's out there. I was a tapper. Yeah. So that was my main thing. I never really took ballet as a kid. I would take some jazz lessons for a few years, but tap is it and I still love it so much and sometimes I go to classes so it's like that thing that never really went away.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Where you were into reading? Were you always a reader growing up?

Brandy Colbert:
Oh yeah. I cannot remember a time that books were not a huge part of my life. My older brother is six years older than me, so I inherited a lot of his books. I remember getting his Little Golden Books and all of that. His picture books and things. And then we would always go to the library every Saturday. I remember librarians being like, "You going to read all those?" Teasing me and I would get offended. I'd be like, "Of course I'm going to read these." Just a little-

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What's the limit? I'm taking it.

Brandy Colbert:
Exactly. Absolutely. It would be like, how many can I take out this week? So always a big part of my life. My parents are both readers, but I would say my mom especially is a really big reader, so she was always the one who pushed that with us. And bookstores as well. I would earn my little allowance and then be allowed to go spend it on ... I guess toys were on the table too, but I was really more interested in the books.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah.

Brandy Colbert:
Yeah. So I would be like, I'm going to go buy my Babysitters Club books or whatever.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh my God. I love The Babysitter Club.

Brandy Colbert:
Yeah. I remember when Kristy's Great Idea Came Out and I was just like, what is this little ... And they hooked me for about the first 30 books, like five Super Specials. You remember it.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yep. I do. So do you remember reading any books with black characters as a kid or do you remember the first one that made it to your hands?

Brandy Colbert:
Oh goodness. This sounds so terrible but I really don't remember reading any. I'm sure I did read some. I would assume they were probably historical fiction, probably dealing with enslavement or the civil rights movement, which I'm very interested in that now, but I really, really wanted books with just carefree kids just getting to live their lives. And I know some of those books were out there, but I think back on that now and I'm like, well, if they were there, I don't think they were in the library because I was the kid who would just go and look at the shelves every week and look for anything new or look for a book I missed by a favorite author. And so I don't remember anything jumping out to me. But I also wonder maybe why the librarians weren't suggesting some of those books or did they not have them? Now I know how curation and collection works, all that stuff. A little inside baseball. But yeah, just on a surface level, I'm really just curious why the few that were out there, why they weren't available to me as a kid.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So as you came into your middle school years, there's just such a desire to fit in middle school and high school and everything. How was that for you in your town and your home?

Brandy Colbert:
In junior high, there were these two black girls that I made friends with right away and really grew close to them and it felt like coming home. It just felt like a sense of relief. There was a shorthand with them where I didn't have to explain myself or they knew about my hair because they did their hair the same way and that kind of thing. One of them was my friend Keisha, and we just really got along. It's not that there weren't any other black kids in my hometown, it's that they typically went to different schools and maybe lived on a different side of town and just didn't have very much interaction. And then I felt self-conscious sometimes being around them because I wasn't around very many black people my age, and so there was maybe that struggle of you feel too black, you feel too white. But with Keisha, I never felt like that, even though she had grown up with a lot more black people than I had.

And then she and her mother moved away after our seventh grade year, and then she and her mother ended up dying in a car accident. It was just tough. Even though she wasn't going to be in eighth grade with me, just knowing that this person that I had connected with so deeply, that she was gone. It was tough. It was a long time ago, but it still impacts. She meant a lot to me and just made me feel, I guess a lot more confident in who I was at such a young age that in a way nobody else was really able to do and just to not really get to contextualize that at the time and thank her for that was a little tough.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh my God. I'm so sorry. And I'm also really ... We both need a minute.

Brandy Colbert:
I didn't mean to do this to us. My apologies.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
No. I appreciate you sharing. What a thing to go through in seventh or eighth grade. Those years are just impossible. They're impossible as a mom of an eighth grader right now. It's so hard. Does she ever show up for you in some of your characters or do you feel like you see her in some of your characters?

Brandy Colbert:
Not yet. I've tried. I'm toying with something maybe dealing with that. Sometimes those things that are so close to you, I can't get a grasp on. Similar to my parents' divorce, which was right around that same time. I've tried to write about it and I just ... That was 30 years ago. I can't do it yet.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Did you write a lot? I gather you probably read for some solace, but did you write a lot growing up? Were you a journaler or were you writing creatively?

Brandy Colbert:
I was writing creatively. Yeah. My dad always says ... And people will talk to him about my new books or he's like, "She has a new book out." And he'll be like, "I just remember her sitting on her bed with her notebooks and pen and just writing and that was it." I always loved to draw. I wasn't the best illustrator, but I always enjoyed it. I don't know. I think the more I read when I mentioned reading books on my own for the first time, the Ramona books and those kinds of things, I grew I think more interested in the craft of storytelling. And so I would draw these little characters and then they would have speech bubbles coming out of their mouth, so they would start having conversations and then I would start narrating at the bottom of the page what was going on, and then the pictures were fewer and fewer, and then finally it was just writing. So I would ask my parents to buy me these spiral notebooks because back in those days didn't have computers.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Maybe some Lisa Frank.

Brandy Colbert:
Oh totally. Oh my gosh. The unicorn flying over an insane rainbow. Yeah. And so I was really into writing. I always say I remember starting writing around age seven. It's funny when I look back at those because I do have those still packed away with me and they were lots of rip-offs of what I was watching at the time. I'm such a TV person. As a kid I used to write in front of the TV.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh yeah.

Brandy Colbert:
Yeah. Right. So convenient plot lines right there at my disposal. And the funny thing I always look back and am astounded by is that all the characters were white. I did not write about black characters at all.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Wow.

Brandy Colbert:
Yeah.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Even in the physical descriptions of them in the-

Brandy Colbert:
Oh, no. Lots of blonde hair, blue eyes, red hair. No black people at all.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Fascinating. When you think about what you were consuming and where you lived. I wonder, did your parents ever read your stuff. Did they ever comment on it?

Brandy Colbert:
They never, as far as I remember, never commented on it. But I do wonder sometimes if their actions were subtly influenced by noticing that and knowing the environment that they had essentially dropped us in.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What kind of actions?

Brandy Colbert:
I feel like our household itself was super black. Culturally black. I always had black dolls even though it was extremely hard to find them in the '80s.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
No Amazon. Yeah.

Brandy Colbert:
No Amazon.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You went to great lengths to get a black doll in the '80s, that's for sure.

Brandy Colbert:
Absolutely. I really don't know how they did it in.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
In the Ozarks

Brandy Colbert:
Exactly. Right. It's like even then if they were black dolls, they weren't necessarily at the local department store, toy store. And we always had black magazines around. Even my mom is a quilter.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, cool.

Brandy Colbert:
A longtime tradition in her family that I'm unfortunately not carrying on. Just a disaster with a needle and thread. And she would make a Sunbonnet Sue quilt, which I still have that here. It would have brown hands. So it was very aware of the images that were being presented in our home, and I do think it was intentional because they knew as soon as we left the house, we weren't going to feel that sense of inclusion.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So good. Great parenting it sounds like actually. All right. So you grew up writing, you're always into it sounds like, and then college comes around and you ended up going a more practical route. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Brandy Colbert:
Yeah. I applied to a few schools around us. It's sad looking back. I think it was a regional thing. I've heard this from other people and I don't know how you feel about growing up in the Midwest, but I feel like our options weren't really presented to us very clearly. It was just like, you're going to go to a state school or a big school, but it's going to be in the Midwest. I didn't even know what liberal arts colleges were, which is where I should have gone. I would've totally thrived at a liberal arts college, but instead I went to a state school in my hometown. It was called Southwest Missouri State. I applied to Mizzou and KU and I got into both of those, but my parents were like, "We'll pay for your school if you stay here and go to school here and just live at home for a couple of years." And so yeah, I went there and I studied journalism and English literature as a minor, so it wasn't all bad.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You were thinking of writing as a technical thing that you could do with another career, but you weren't thinking at that time I want to be ... Or were you thinking I maybe want to be a novelist, I want to write stories, or were you thinking I'm a good writer, journalism seems like a natural thing you can do?

Brandy Colbert:
It was both. I still at the back of my mind wanted to be a published author like I wanted to be since I understood that I could write stories on my own. But I took some journalism classes in high school. I really fell in love with it. I loved the reporting of it. I loved that I was able to make these stories out of nothing, but it was all factual. And honestly, I didn't know ... Again, it's like the liberal arts college. It's like I didn't know you could study creative writing in school, and I don't think my parents would've been down to pay for a creative writing degree. So it was a happy medium of I get to write, but it is more of a practical endeavor and my parents are going to support this.

"It's important therefore to know who the real enemy is and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work, it keeps you explaining over and over again your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language, and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly, so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says that you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says that you have no kingdoms, and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary."

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That's a passage from Tony Morrison's 1975 speech, a humanist view, which she gave at Portland State University. Brandy's first introduction, Toni Morrison was in college.

Brandy Colbert:
I took these really great literature classes with a female professor and I don't know, I just loved the way she taught. I loved her book list and she introduced me to so many authors, and that's when I started reading black authors, which is embarrassing to say. Just the truth.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I don't think you're alone. I know you're not. I remember talking to Zeta Elliot, I remember she had definitely had that experience. She was like, "Where were these people in my high school?"

Brandy Colbert:
Exactly. And it opened a whole new world to me. And so that's when I first read Toni Morrison and I read Sula. It was the first thing I read by her, and I was just like, but you can write about black women like this. And they don't have to be perfect and they can be shitty.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Toni Morrison's writing helped Brandy recognize the value of her own perspective as a black woman and a creator, but just as that 1975 speech predicted, defending her writing's right to exist has encroached on Brandy's creative time, energy, and identity.

Brandy Colbert:
I actually think it's something that's impacted me more in the years since I've read it. And I would specifically say that for me, it relates to the recent book bannings. But I would also say maybe publishing's most recent diversity push, which would've been closer to around the time when I first read this, it's horrible. We all know what's going on and we know the specific books that are being targeted and why. And now I find that often for panels or talks, people only want to talk to you about book banning if you're an author whose books are being targeted, and mine are primarily just for black characters, I guess. Sexual content. One of them, they don't like that one of the characters has two dads.

I'm happy to engage with it to a certain degree, but after a while I've had to just say, you know what, I'm not participating in panels specifically about book banning anymore. I do think it's a distraction. I want to talk about my art. I want to talk about the craft of writing. I don't want to ignore what's going on out there, but ... I've even had people ask, "Well, does this make you want to write different things?" And I'm like, no. Knowing that I could write a book that could get banned doesn't make me want to write different things. To me, that's giving in to the very notion of why they're banning books. And I'm really glad that there are a lot of authors who do want to speak out about things that I don't necessarily want to. I think we all have different roles that we play in the industry and in our own careers. But I do find that it seems some authors now become the mouthpiece for book banning when I'm like, gosh, I know you're an incredible writer. I know you probably want to be working on your books.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
And it's just falling obviously disproportionately on people of color, LGBTQ, anybody whose personhood is being banned so to speak.

Brandy Colbert:
Absolutely.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So then everybody else gets to talk about their craft.

Brandy Colbert:
Right. Exactly.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Okay. So now I'd like to talk about what led you from this very practical writing career path that you took to your work as an author today. So why don't you start by telling us about your first job out of college and how you got to California.

Brandy Colbert:
Yeah. I worked for Lowe's, the hardware chain. I started when I was 16 and I ended up working there all the way through the rest of high school all the way through college. I was going to quit, but I wanted to move to LA and I was like, well, maybe I can get there through a transfer. So they had just opened a brand new Lowe's store out here in Burbank, and my store manager called in a favor and got me transferred there. So I moved out here and had that job for a year and then I was also interning. I would go in and work from I think 6:30 in the morning, which is just wild to me now, until 3:30 or 2:30, something like that in the afternoon. And then I would go and intern at an alt weekly. I know there's not very many left, but there was one. It was called Entertainment Today, which is like, okay. But I would go intern there. They let me write reviews. They just really, again, gave me a lot of freedom there. It's just this kid that cold called them and was like, "Can I come intern for you?"

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Sure.

Brandy Colbert:
Yeah. Right?

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah.

Brandy Colbert:
So I did that for about a year and a few months, and then I got my first magazine job, which was at Muscle & Fitness Hers. The one for women.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yes. Wow.

Brandy Colbert:
Yeah.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I'm always amazed by what writing ... I've heard people tell me they worked for an Architectural Digest, and then you're like, nothing about architecture. It's like you just go into this thing and you're like, I don't know anything. I don't know. Were you really into fitness?

Brandy Colbert:
No. No more than the average person. No. It was a whole new world to me. I remember my brother had subscribed to Muscle & Fitness. Just the main one growing up. So I remembered the brand. But getting there and seeing ... Muscle & Fitness isn't even the hardcore when there's one called Flex where it's just those just truly bodybuilders at the top of their game. Little tough to look at the photos sometimes.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
There's a common piece of advice for aspiring writers to not get a job where you have to write. If you spend all day writing for things as a career, then you won't have anything left in the tank for writing for yourself. Brandy, however, was not going to let a day job derail the author dream. Despite spending her days writing about things like women's muscles, she still found the passion within herself to work on stories of her own.

Brandy Colbert:
I have a bunch of ... And I'm sure they're still in my Rubbermaid tote full of notebooks that I have. But I had a bunch of stuff that I would start and I wouldn't finish it. Those were adult novels.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So you were writing for adults mostly first?

Brandy Colbert:
I was.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That was your starting point.

Brandy Colbert:
Yeah. In my early 20s, which was so funny to look back at because now I'm even just looking at pictures, I'm like, you were a baby. You were an infant. You had no idea how the world worked or anything like that. But I of course thought I could write this novel about people even older than me. So I had a story about relationships basically. Not really about anything else. And I went to take this writing course because I was like, okay, you've got to be able to show your writing to people. If you really want to go on this publishing journey, that's the whole point. So I took a six-week writing course from a local writing instructor, and that was really helpful in just being able to share my work and getting feedback, which was tough. I remember getting a note from someone that was like, "This is lazy writing. You're a better writer than this." And I was like, oh my gosh. I still remember that, and it's like I needed that tough feedback from someone who didn't know me.

So then that I think opened a door to me being like, okay, I can show my writing to people. I'm getting good feedback. I can take it and implement it into the work. And then I started looking up agents and looking to query, but I had a feeling like the book wasn't quite where it needed to be. And I don't remember what the first YA book was that I read as an adult, but I somehow rediscovered YA. It was like, wait a minute, these books are fun and they're doing things that I'm interested in doing in my writing, but they're for teens. Is that okay? And I was still watching a lot of Dawson's Creek and stuff. I was not a teenager anymore-

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Teen show. Yes.

Brandy Colbert:
Exactly. Still watching the teen shows. And so that's when I decided to write YA. And so I took the same story that I had been working on, which was truly about nothing but relationships and just aged it down. And that was the first book that I ended up querying a hundred agents with.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
And.

Brandy Colbert:
Like a hundred rejections. Yes.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Some people say Just being able to be a writer is half skill and half willingness to deal with rejection.

Brandy Colbert:
I 100% agree with that. I take also rejection as a challenge. So I was like, oh, you know what? I'm going to come back with something better. So I just kept writing and I wrote three more books, and then the fourth book that I wrote for publication ended up querying. I almost quit because I had gotten pretty far in revise and resubmit with an agent, and then she ended up being like, "I just don't think there's anything I can actually do for you." And I was just devastated. Because I was like, this is the best thing.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That's harder. Of course.

Brandy Colbert:
Absolutely. Because I knew I was the better writer and I knew it was the best thing I'd ever written, and I was just like, she's a great agent. She knows what she's talking about. She publishes all the types of books that I want to be publishing so I almost quit. I sent out maybe five more queries, and I think I got four more rejections. And then one agent was like, "I would like to read this." And she read it and she asked for a revise and resubmit, and then it got laid off on a Friday. That Monday, that agent called and offered me representation that ended up being my first book, and we sold it a month later maybe, when I was driving on my way moving back to LA.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That's so cool.

Brandy Colbert:
Yeah.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That first novel was Point, a dramatic and emotional story about a young ballerina. While Brandy's own dance background was deeply rooted in tap, she took on the challenge to authentically portray the intricate universe of ballet. This would mark the beginning of what has become a hallmark of Brandy's work over the years. Highly researched and accurate depictions of very specific experiences. Her commitment to thorough research proves that, at least for Brandy, the often repeated adage write what you know is more of a suggestion.

Brandy Colbert:
I've always loved research. Going down rabbit holes and just two hours later you come up and you're like, oh my God, I know everything there is to know about anteaters or whatever.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Is that journalism background, I guess?

Brandy Colbert:
I think it must be. Yeah. And then when I worked at that terrible job in Chicago ... I don't know what was going on there. But I was a business writer, and so I would have to interview all these business owners, and they were just all kinds of truly from people who made widgets to just whatever. And so I learned a lot about a lot of different types of businesses. I feel like that was always interesting. I was always pivoting, able to learn a little bit about a lot of stuff.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
How do you build these various characters? What is your way that you're thinking of them? Do you come up with their name? What is the order of name any of these?

Brandy Colbert:
Yeah. Well, sometimes I'll think, oh, I've got this character, it's working. And then I'll be like, no, that's not their name. And I have to go back and I'll just spend days working out names. Names are really, really big to me. I love them. I think about them. I know some people don't. They'll just be like, it's Alice or whatever. And I'm like, fine. Perfectly great name. But I just really engaging with names and I can't start writing the character until the name feels right to me, and there's no set process in why it feels right to me. It just does.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
So do you cast your books before you write your books, or do you have a general idea of I'm going to write this book about X, Y, Z, or do you just say, this is my ... I don't know. How does that happen? And then what's your practice?

Brandy Colbert:
Yeah. I usually will. It comes about like, yeah, I want to write about this thing. I typically write female, woman, girl characters. So I know it's going to be that. And then once I get the name, I guess it's a personality or I start thinking what was their background? How did they grow up, what are they interested in, what do they do? Like you said, because I'm so interested in people having passions or all of that. And then all of that informs it. I don't outline. I probably should. Unless it's nonfiction. I do outline nonfiction.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh my God. With that book, I bought it must be like 20 copies of Blackbirds in the Sky. That book is just-

Brandy Colbert:
Oh my gosh, thank you.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Insanely well written. I can't even-

Brandy Colbert:
Thank you so much.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. It's gorgeous.

Brandy Colbert:
I've heard from a lot of adults that are like, "I learned so much."

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I learned so much. I learned about your hometown, about the very beginning. I think the way you root everything there and this is how we got here, the Trail of Tears. Just the build of that book is incredible.

Brandy Colbert:
Oh, thank you. I am very proud of it so that means a lot. But yeah, I had to outline that or it would've been harder than it already was. But for fiction, I feel like I truly lose the plot if I outline or write about what I'm going to write about before I actually just do it. But I would probably save a little more time because sometimes I'm like, oh, here's a new character. Well, what's their role? Okay, now they need a name. And so then you are back to square one, but it just has always worked out that way.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Something I find really effective in your work is the specificity. And there's this quote that I quote often. In the particular lies the universal. And I think that really speaks to your writing. And even when you're writing about this particular moment in history or place, you just get very deep into the individuals within the book. So deep that really anyone or everyone can connect with it in some way. And in particular, I was blown away by the way that you wrote about the Tulsa race massacre with Blackbirds because it is nonfiction, but it reads like fiction because these actual people become characters in a very tragic story. And then conversely, your fiction has a depth of history to it.

Brandy Colbert:
Yeah. I love that you brought that up because I dedicated my book, The Voting Booth, which is fiction, but to Fannie Lou Hamer who is just this incredible activist. But the way I even came across her was I heard that quote, I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired, and I was like, who said that? That's incredible.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That is somebody I believe in.

Brandy Colbert:
Exactly. I want to know more about them. And then to not have known anything about her and then to have all this research to be able to do into her life. And so yeah, I just think you can get pulled in so many different ways. But for her, her personality, she had all these amazing sayings and speeches and things. Yeah. She was a character to me first before I learned about everything she actually did.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. You're like the Ida B. Wells. Is that you?

Brandy Colbert:
I love Ida B. Yeah. I got to put a hole sidebar in Blackbirds in the Sky about Ida B. Wells. Yeah. I love her. But I think for me, writing Blackbirds, it was really impactful because I am a big truth teller. I'm a bad liar. I'm really good at telling the truth. And I wanted to do that with kids in a way that provided context because essentially Blackbirds in the Sky is a history book, which is just like I said, I think in the foreword, I never thought I would write a history book. But I knew there was a way to make it interesting, and that wasn't really the way I was taught history in school. I was just really taught a lot of dates and names.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Memorization.

Brandy Colbert:
Memorize this. Exactly. With no context given to anything. Again, like I said, in the foreword of the book, the Trail of Tears went through my hometown and we never talked about it in any accessible way, which is truly crazy. So I really like that nonfiction tells the truth to kids in maybe a more palatable, more accessible way than adult books would do, but it's still the truth.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Brandy's newest release is a young adult novel called The Blackwoods, which weaves together multiple narratives to tell the story of Blossom Blackwood, a groundbreaking Hollywood star and the matriarch of what becomes a family dynasty. That novel too has been praised for its accuracy. And hot tip, I listened to this one as an audiobook and it was really fabulous.

Brandy Colbert:
Yeah. No. It's been interesting. I've spoken to some people who work in Hollywood and they've been like, "Oh my God, how did you get this so right?" And I'm like, oh, thank God. It's not like I had a Hollywood sensitivity read on it or anything. So that was really helpful because I just took so much of that from working at Backstage for almost a decade. And so was I was the copy editor, so I read literally everything that went in the magazine several times and really appreciated the actor interviews because there were so many similarities from a creative standpoint to writing. And so if I were feeling down in the dumps about things, I would read this article and it's like, well, this person struggled. It's not always going to be easy. So that's been really nice to hear about the technical aspects of it have been correct.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
How are your school visits going? Do you have any memorable stories from any of your books that you want to speak to?

Brandy Colbert:
Yeah. I think they're always surprising to me because I am always very nervous.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, really? Why?

Brandy Colbert:
Yeah. I don't know. Yeah-

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I guess you're going to talk to high schoolers. High schoolers, they can be a little scary most of the time.

Brandy Colbert:
Totally. Yeah. Where I'm just like, you always look back and there's always some kid with their head down in the back row and you're just like, okay.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That is harder. You know what I mean? Picture you're going to speak to elementary, don't be scared. They're so sweet. They're still pleasing people. Now high school, they're over everything. I could see it. I see it.

Brandy Colbert:
Yeah. They're over it. I'll notice the kids didn't seem engaged, but then afterwards, there's always those kids who will come up to you and just hang out waiting until everybody leaves to ask you a question or tell you something that you said that impacted them. And that really means a lot to me. Often it'll be some of the only black kids in the school or in the class or whatever. Even if they don't say that impacted me, they might ask me a question. Like, "How did you deal with this?" And I'm just like, "Oh my gosh, they think I'm an expert. They're asking me for advice. I don't know what's going on still." But just that they saw some part of them, I guess that related to me means so much because I didn't have that growing up in terms of didn't see authors doing what I do. And then even meeting with middle schoolers because of the only The Only Black Girls in Town typically, and they are funny because they're so engaged and they're asking a lot of questions and I'm just so impressed by how with it they are and these intelligent, well-crafted questions.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Can you think of any that took you off guard? Any of those questions that are ... I don't know. Not to give guard. Just some that stand out to you.

Brandy Colbert:
I remember I was giving a presentation. This was over Zoom, so this was in the thick of the pandemic. I don't remember exactly what he asked. It was an LA school, and he was a younger white kid. And he asked just this super insightful question about race and writing race, and I was just like, wow, somebody's doing something right here. It was just really thoughtful and thoughtful as to his own privilege. And he's like 11 or 12 or something, and I'm just like, wow, what a kid.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I know. I look at that time too though as their consciousness was elevated. You hope that that keeps moving forward. Not snapping back.

Brandy Colbert:
Yeah. I always think the kids are doing a much better job than adults. I was pretty taken aback. I was working on Blackbirds in the Sky in 2020 when-

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
God, what a time to have been working on that book. That's wild.

Brandy Colbert:
So wild to think about it. Yeah. I think it actually was really helpful to me. It bolstered things in a way that maybe wouldn't have felt so urgent. And so I don't know. I just felt even more passionate while I was writing it. But yeah, I feel like there were a lot of people who first realized racism is a problem, and I'm like, I don't understand. I felt like we went through this in 2014 and 2015. It's just the collective forgetfulness is really upsetting to me. But I'm hopeful that kids, they're staying aware and they aren't forgetting, I hope. Yeah. I don't know.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What is your desire when you do create, you have just an extreme diversity of characters in books. There's layers of intersectionality for many different characters. What is your hope or purpose in wanting to present that to the world and to kids who are reading your books?

Brandy Colbert:
I guess I just want people to be more open-minded when they meet people. I remember my first therapist many years ago ... This was when I was in Chicago, and I was like, it's really weird. I was like, I lived on the north side and there were definitely people of color and black people who lived over there, but not a lot. And I remembered I would take the train and then get off my stop and walk to my house. I would just get weird looks. Not hostile looks, but just like, "Huh. What are you doing here?" It's just like, there are black people everywhere. We're allowed to be wherever we want to be. And it just really upset me. And I remember talking to my therapist at the time about that, and she was like, "I don't think you realize people don't necessarily see you the way you see yourself. They may look at you and assume certain things." And so I don't like that assumption of just someone's socioeconomic status or their personality, whatever it may be.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Their religion.

Brandy Colbert:
Their religion. Exactly. Right. And I remember when I was writing Little & Lion, maybe even ... I don't know if it was seeing reviews or whatever after it was out. But people were like, "A black Jewish bisexual character. What is that about?" And I was just like, I'm only black. I'm not Jewish, or I don't identify as queer. But I remember talking to one of my cousins and she was like, "Well, my cousin on the other side is a black Jewish lesbian. She exists." And I didn't even know that. So it's just like not trying to write anything that feels fantastical, but just saying, yeah, these are intersections that exist. These are real people and these are people who have to deal with a whole myriad of things that a lot of us don't have to.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Brandy's mix of fact, history and enticingly deep characters has been a defining feature of her work for her Reading Challenge, powerful nonfiction. She invites readers to explore nonfiction books that skillfully weave these same elements together.

Brandy Colbert:
This is a list of nonfiction books that will open minds, challenge assumptions, and highlight the power of historical truth for young readers and beyond. So yeah, I feel like maybe I wasn't paying as much attention to nonfiction as I should have been in the young people space before I wrote my own but there's so many great books. I was just astounded. Even in the year that Blackbird in the Sky published, it was like, wow, this is a really incredible year for nonfiction.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Today's Beanstack featured librarian is once again, Cindy Philbeck. A teacher librarian at Wando High School in Charleston County, South Carolina. She told us a heartwarming story about a student's discovery of Sabaa Tahir's All My Rage.

Cindy Philbeck:
A student came to the circulation desk and she was returning a book, and she was very happy with All My Rage, and she thought it was fantastic. Sabaa Tahir was just amazing. And she was energetic because she was Muslim. And she said, "I didn't realize we had books here with Muslim characters." And I said, "Well, if you like that one, there's going to be another book that I think you might like. It's called As Long as the Lemon Tree Grows." And she was like, "You're kidding me." So she checked that book out as well, and she fell in love with Zoulfa Katouh. And she also ended up starting a club for Muslim students within the next few months. So this was a junior and she made it all the way to her junior year before she realized we had books with Muslim characters and she was just overwhelmed and excited.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
This has been The Reading Culture, and you've been listening to our conversation with Brandy Colbert. Again, I'm your host, Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and currently I'm reading Victory Stand by Derrick Barnes, Tommie Smith and Dawud Anyabwile, and The Emotional Lives of Teenagers by Lisa Damour. If you enjoyed today's episode, please show some love and give us a five star review. It just takes a second and really helps.

To learn more about how you can help grow your community's reading culture, you can check out all of our resources at beanstack.com, and remember to sign up for our newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter for special offers and insights. This episode was produced by Jackie Lamport and Lower Street Media and script edited by Josiah Lamberto Egan. Thanks for joining and keep reading.