I’m so thrilled to welcome Kosoko Jackson back to the site, this month of his newest release, I’m So (Not) Over You (Berkley), which publishes on the 22nd! I have been floored by how much he’s been putting out in the world lately, and I’m so excited about everything coming up, so please give him a warm welcome!
I’m so, so excited to see you keep jumping into new spaces, but perhaps the one I’m most excited about is the world of rom-coms! What’s the story behind I’m So (Not) Over You and making the move from YA to Adult?
Thank you! I’m super excited to be here. It’s been so much fun writing them, exploring tropes, and writing HEAs. Honestly, the story isn’t that jaw dropping, haha. About 3 years ago, I really needed to reevaluate what I wanted to write and what brought me joy. I was lying in bed, listening to Taylor Swift, as one does, and thought; I want to write rom-coms. I emailed my agent, and then over the next year or so, I wrote…4 different proposals, each 50 pages each, until we narrowed down the right one, sent it off, and 4 months later, I was signed to Berkley! It was a leap of faith I’m really happy I took.
Of course, that’s not a permanent move; in fact you’ll be back in YA in about five seconds with Survive the Dome, which could not feel like a more relevant story right now. What was it like to write that book against the background of 2020s America, and what do you hope readers take from it?
Don’t remind me! True whiplash! Survive the Dome couldn’t be more different than I’m So (Not) Over You. Survive The Dome was my act of resistance against everything happening in the news. I couldn’t go out and protest, thanks to the pandemic and living in NYC, so I wanted to do something, so I really poured my resistance into this book. I want people to take away that revolutions are often led by people of color, women of color, and youth of color, and we should put them at the forefront of conversations far more often than we do.
Dipping back into adult romance for a sec, you also published a short story last fall in Love All Year, which sounds like the most delightful anthology. How did you get involved, and can you tell us a little bit about “Kwanzaa Kiss”?
Sure! Honestly, it was an open call. I was chatting with Denise Wiliams (read her book The Fastest Way To Fall, by the way), chatting about a Kwanzaa rom com, and she mentioned the Love All Year sequel. The story wasn’t enough for a full book, so this seemed a perfect way to tell the story. “Kwanzaa Kiss” is a scavenger hunt rom com between two men who team up to find seven things that represent each of the core principles of Kwanzaa. And of course, love comes through!
You also have a new essay in the collection Black Love Matters, which released with perfect timing to kick off Black History Month. How was collaborating on an essay collection, and what do you love about it as a whole?
You’re making me realize I need to take a BREAK. I’ve written so much the past year haha. This was so much fun! I’m so honored Berkley put oy name forward, and Jessica was into the idea. I rarely see anthologies that center not only Black people, but Black love. It was so great to work with such rom com and romance titans, and be in an anthology with them and learn from them. I also got to talk about my favorite topics, movies, tv and love, so honestly, I won, haha.
I got the joy (completely coincidentally) of revealing the covers for both of your new books, but you had a fabulous third new cover out this year, for the paperback of Yesterday Is History. How did that cover change come about, and what do you love about the new design?
Thank you so much for doing them both by the way. The hardest-working person in publishing right here. I LOVE the new cover for Yesterday Is History. Honestly, again, not the most interesting story. My publisher, Sourcebooks, said they wanted a cover that resonated with the key thing people loved about the story; the romance. So they wanted to put that front and center with a speculative hint towards it. Having Andre falling also represents his first jump in time, in chapter 1. And the cover shows he ends up with someone but you don’t know who! It’s so beautiful.
You’ve also been on LGBTQReads before, in a pre-author capacity, in one of my favorite posts in the history of the site. Where is the Black Queer Male Voice in YA? was published back on August 31, 2017, back before authors like you, Ryan Douglass (also featured), Julian Winters, Kacen Callender, and Jay Coles made your way onto shelves and changed the game. How are you feeling about the queer Black male voice in YA now, and where you’d still like to see it go?
2017? That was so long ago and it feels like yesterday. I’m loving to see so many more queer Black boys. Especially in YA and Middle Grade. I wish I had these authors to look up to when I was 13. But it’s awesome to see that teens and young adults will be able to read books that aren’t just about coming out, or the struggles of being Black and queer, but to see stories where Queer characters are fully fledged and well thoguht out people, with motives, feelings, fears, and flaws. That’s crucial, not only for us, to see ourselves, but for others to learn empathy.
Of course, the conversation about being a queer man in romance is one that’s gotten a whole lot of traction lately as well. Given the floor to say your piece about it, what would you like both the industry and readers to know about the experience of publishing m/m romance as a queer (or whatever label you prefer!) man?
I think it’s important that we as a community understand we cannot and should not police who writes what. That’s a dangerous slope and a dangerous path to go down. That being said, I think its also very important we allow queer men to tell their stories authentically. We shouldn’t judge by hetronormative standards and publishing should, along with readers, make more of an effort to uplift queer stories. Marginalized voices within the community should be prioritized when telling those stories. That, to me, isn’t an out-there idea.
I think we’re all out of ways to sugarcoat the fact that publishing during a pandemic sucks, and debuting during a pandemic doubly so, although there are definitely some perks as far as increased access to events goes. What have you found to be the best and worst parts of debuting in 2021, and what fellow pandemic debuts would you like to shout out?
I think the best also goes back to the Great Resignation of workers. I’ve found that I’ve really honed in on what I care about and the stories I want to tell. I’ve become braver and more confident in my writing, because I’ve seen how fleeting everything that we have erected and held dear. I think that’s morbid, sure, but I embrace this confidence I’ve fostered. The saddest thing, as we all know, is no in person events, but also how much stress is being put on publishing employees. We’re losing great talent during this pandemic because of how our industry treats publishing employees, especially marginalized ones and people of color.
With so many different things under your belt, I’m particularly interested in your answer to my final question: what’s up next for you?
By the time this comes out my next YA, coming out in 2023 by Quilltree would have been announced, and I’m so so thrilled to be stepping into fantasy and dark academia. My next rom com also comes out December of this year, A Dash of Salt and Pepper, and it follows a small town DILF chef in a fictional version of Stars Hollow, the 20-something who returns home after losing his job and his boyfriend, and Taming of the Shrew vibes!
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England, 1585. In Kit Marlowe’s last year at Cambridge, he is approached by Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster offering an unorthodox career opportunity: going undercover to intercept a Catholic plot to put Mary, Queen of Scots on Elizabeth’s throne.
When Griffin’s first love and ex-boyfriend, Theo, dies in a drowning accident, his universe implodes. Even though Theo had moved to California for college and started seeing Jackson, Griffin never doubted Theo would come back to him when the time was right. But now, the future he’s been imagining for himself has gone far off course.
Just out of high school, Emi Price is a talented young set designer already beginning to thrive in the L.A. film scene. But her artistic eye has failed her in one key area: helping her to design a love life that’s more than make-believe. Then she finds a mysterious letter at an estate sale, and it sends her chasing down the loose ends of a movie icon’s hidden life. And along the way, she finds Ava, and at long last, Emi’s own hidden life begins to bloom.
Marty arrives in London with nothing but his oboe and some savings from his summer job, but he’s excited to start his new life–where he’s no longer the closeted, shy kid who slips under the radar and is free to explore his sexuality without his parents’ disapproval.
The year is 1988 and 28-year-old Kevin Doyle is bone-tired of attending funerals. It’s been two years since his partner Francesco died from AIDS, an epidemic ravaging New York City and going largely ignored by the government, leaving those effected to suffer in silence, feeling unjustifiable shame and guilt on top of their loss.
The spellbinding tale of six queer witches forging their own paths, shrouded in the mist, magic, and secrets of the ancient California redwoods.
Emily and her mom were always lucky. But Emily’s mom’s luck ran out three years ago when she succumbed to cancer, and nothing has felt right for Emily since.
A few weeks ago, Kane Montgomery was in an accident that robbed him of his memory. The only thing he knows for certain is that the police found him half-dead in the river. The world as he knows it feels different―reality seems different. And when strange things start happening around him, Kane isn’t sure where to turn.
Ava Simon designs storage boxes for STÄDA, a slick Brooklyn-based furniture company. She’s hard-working, obsessive, and heartbroken from a tragedy that killed her girlfriend and upended her life. It’s been years since she’s let anyone in.
PRIVATE NUMBER: Wouldn’t you look better without a cheater on your arm?
For Veronica Clayton, the sudden death of her mother has turned her naturally bright and happy-go-lucky view of the world bleak. As the Police Protection Officer for the Queen’s children, she has purpose, but for the next six months, the Queen’s family is the focus of a documentary on royal life. The last thing Clay wants is a camera pointed in her face.
It’s a hot summer, and life’s going all right for Jackson and his family on the Mish. It’s almost Christmas, school’s out, and he’s hanging with his mates, teasing the visiting tourists, avoiding the racist boys in town. Just like every year, Jackson’s Aunty and annoying little cousins visit from the city – but this time a mysterious boy with a troubled past comes with them… As their friendship evolves, Jackson must confront the changing shapes of his relationships with his friends, family and community. And he must face his darkest secret – a secret he thought he’d locked away for good.
Transgressive, foulmouthed, and devastatingly funny, Brontez Purnell’s 100 Boyfriends is a revelatory spiral into the imperfect lives of queer men desperately fighting—and often losing—the urge to self-sabotage. His characters solicit sex on their lunch breaks, expose themselves to racist neighbors, sleep with their coworker’s husbands, rub Preparation H on their hungover eyes, and, in an uproarious epilogue, take a punk band on a disastrous tour of Europe. They also travel to claim inheritances, push past personal trauma, and cultivate community while living on the margins of a white supremacist, heteronormative society.
Orphaned and forced to serve her country’s ruling group of scribes, Karis wants nothing more than to find her brother, long ago shipped away. But family bonds don’t matter to the Scriptorium, whose sole focus is unlocking the magic of an ancient automaton army.
Randa Jarrar is a fearless voice of dissent who has been called “politically incorrect” (Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times). As an American raised for a time in Egypt, and finding herself captivated by the story of a celebrated Egyptian belly dancer’s journey across the United States in the 1940s, she sets off from her home in California to her parents’ in Connecticut.
Andre Cobb hopes his luck is finally turning around. After being sick for as long as he can remember, he’s finally gotten the liver transplant he desperately needed. Now his life can finally begin. But weeks after the operation, he feels shaky and ill, passes out, and wakes up somewhere totally unexpected…the past.
Fire burns bright and has a long memory….
Marty arrives in London with nothing but his oboe and some savings from his summer job, but he’s excited to start his new life–where he’s no longer the closeted, shy kid who slips under the radar and is free to explore his sexuality without his parents’ disapproval.
Kink is a dynamic anthology of literary fiction that opens an imaginative door into the world of desire. The stories within this collection portray love, desire, BDSM, and sexual kinks in all their glory with a bold new vision. The collection includes works by renowned fiction writers such as Callum Angus, Alexander Chee, Vanessa Clark, Melissa Febos, Kim Fu, Roxane Gay, Cara Hoffman, Zeyn Joukhadar, Chris Kraus, Carmen Maria Machado, Peter Mountford, Larissa Pham, and Brandon Taylor, with Garth Greenwell and R.O. Kwon as editors.
Natalie Chan gained her corporate citizenship, but barely survived the battle for Tribulation.
Anne Bonny had it all—her own ship, a pirate crew, and a fearsome reputation—but a new enemy has her on the run and it’ll take all of Anne’s courage to stay afloat. The night before a major heist, Anne has an unsettling dream, and come morning, the robbery is thwarted by Woodes Roger, a zealot who has sworn to eliminate piracy. With no plan to escape, Anne must persuade her crew to seek the meaning of her dream—or perish. Full of sass, solidarity, and swordplay, Tell No Tales is a graphic novel about belonging, belief, and how far we’re willing to go to protect the ones we love.
William Anson is done with relationships, thanks. He’s starting the second year of his medicine degree single, focused, and ready to mingle with purely platonic intentions.
New York, 1925
Set in the year between the 2015 Supreme Court marriage equality ruling and the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre, Let’s Get Back to the Party explores the intertwined lives of two gay men named Sebastian Mote and Oscar Burnham: estranged childhood friends who reconnect as adults in Washington, DC.
11-year-old Stevie is an avid reader and she knows a lot of things about a lot of things. But these are the things she’d like to know the most:
For years, Robin Thorpe has kept her head down, staying among her people in the Riverside neighborhood and hiding the magic that would have her imprisoned by the state. But when Grace Hensley comes knocking on Clan Thorpe’s door, Robin’s days of hiding are at an end. As freed witches flood the streets of Kingston, scrambling to reintegrate with a kingdom that destroyed their lives, Robin begins to plot a course that will ensure a freer, juster Aeland. At the same time, she has to face her long-bottled feelings for the childhood love that vanished into an asylum twenty years ago.
Choose your player.
In this wry and hilarious queer romantic comedy, fifteen-year-old Phoebe realizes that falling in love is maybe not just for losers.
African American lesbian writers and theorists have made extraordinary contributions to feminist theory, activism, and writing. Mouths of Rain, the companion anthology to Beverly Guy-Sheftall’s classic Words of Fire, traces the long history of intellectual thought produced by Black Lesbian writers, spanning the nineteenth century through the twenty-first century.
With her newly completed PhD in astronomy in hand, twenty-eight-year-old Grace Porter goes on a girls’ trip to Vegas to celebrate. She’s a straight A, work-through-the-summer certified high achiever. She is not the kind of person who goes to Vegas and gets drunkenly married to a woman whose name she doesn’t know…until she does exactly that.
World War II is raging, and five teens are looking to make a mark. Daniel and Rebeka seek revenge against the Nazis who slaughtered their family; Simone is determined to fight back against the oppressors who ruined her life and corrupted her girlfriend; Phillip aims to prove that he’s better than his worst mistakes; and Liam is searching for a way to control the portal to the shadow world he’s uncovered, and the monsters that live within it–before the Nazi regime can do the same. When the five meet, and begrudgingly team up, in the forests of Germany, none of them knows what their future might hold.
Charlie Matheson has spent his life taking care of things. When his parents died two days before his eighteenth birthday, he took care of his younger brother, even though that meant putting his own dreams on hold. He took care of his father’s hardware store, building it into something known several towns over. He took care of the cat he found in the woods…so now he has a cat.
In this delightfully compelling full-color graphic memoir, the author shares her process of undoing the effects of a patriarchal, colonial society on her self-image, her sexuality, and her concept of freedom. Reflecting on the ways in which oppression was the cause for her late bloom into queerness, we are invited to discover people and things in the author’s life that helped shape and inform her LGBTQ identity. And we come to an understanding of her holistic definition of queerness.
Robin Loxleigh and his sister Marianne are the hit of the Season, so attractive and delightful that nobody looks behind their pretty faces.
Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can’t remember exactly when the question took root, but the answer was in full bloom the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club.
It’s a hot summer, and life’s going all right for Jackson and his family on the Mish. It’s almost Christmas, school’s out, and he’s hanging with his mates, teasing the visiting tourists, avoiding the racist boys in town. Just like every year, Jackson’s Aunty and annoying little cousins visit from the city – but this time a mysterious boy with a troubled past comes with them… As their friendship evolves, Jackson must confront the changing shapes of his relationships with his friends, family and community. And he must face his darkest secret – a secret he thought he’d locked away for good.
Emil and Brighton Rey defied the odds. They beat the Blood Casters and escaped with their lives–or so they thought. When Brighton drank the Reaper’s Blood, he believed it would make him invincible, but instead the potion is killing him.
For seven long years, while she was imprisoned on a debtor’s ship, Amaya Chandra had one plan: to survive. But now, survival is not enough. She has people counting on her; counting on her for protection, for leadership, for vengeance. And after escaping Moray by the skin of her teeth, she’s determined to track down the man who betrayed her and her friends.
When two teens discover that they were both sexually assaulted at the same party, they develop a cautious friendship through her family’s possibly-magical pastelería, his secret forest of otherworldly trees, and the swallows returning to their hometown, in Anna-Marie McLemore’s The Mirror Season…
To Daya Wijesinghe, a bruise is a mixture of comfort and control. Since her parents died in an accident she survived, bruises have become a way to keep her pain on the surface of her skin so she doesn’t need to deal with the ache deep in her heart.
Seventeen-year-old Pakistani immigrant Zara Hossain has been leading a fairly typical life in Corpus Christi, Texas, since her family moved there for her father to work as a pediatrician. While dealing with the Islamophobia that she faces at school, Zara has to lay low, trying not to stir up any trouble and jeopardize their family’s dependent visa status while they await their green card approval, which has been in process for almost nine years.
Noah Ramirez thinks he’s an expert on romance. He has to be for his popular blog, the Meet Cute Diary, a collection of trans happily ever afters. There’s just one problem—all the stories are fake. What started as the fantasies of a trans boy afraid to step out of the closet has grown into a beacon of hope for trans readers across the globe.
When Humaira “Hani” Khan comes out to her friends as bisexual, they immediately doubt her. Apparently, she can’t be bi if she’s only dated guys. Cornered into proving her sexuality, she tells them she’s dating someone—Ishita “Ishu” Dey, the straight A student who seems more concerned with studying than relationships.
Fifteen-year-old Spencer Harris is a proud nerd, an awesome big brother, and a David Beckham in training. He’s also transgender. After transitioning at his old school leads to a year of isolation and bullying, Spencer gets a fresh start at Oakley, the most liberal private school in Ohio.
When two Niveus Private Academy students, Devon Richards and Chiamaka Adebayo, are selected to be part of the elite school’s senior class prefects, it looks like their year is off to an amazing start. After all, not only does it look great on college applications, but it officially puts each of them in the running for valedictorian, too.
When Nozomi Nagai pictured the ideal summer romance, a fake one wasn’t what she had in mind.
In a home where social conservatism, machismo, and masculine identity run deep, Corpus Christi, Texas high school senior Julián Luna is forced to keep his gay identity a secret. Jules’ only focus is laying low the next ten months and enjoying every moment he has left with his friends before college takes them on separate paths.
Dani and Eden Rivera were both born to kill dragons, but the sisters couldn’t be more different. For Dani, dragon slaying takes a back seat to normal high school life, while Eden prioritizes training above everything else. Yet they both agree on one thing: it’s kill or be killed where dragons are concerned.
The shadow of Godolia’s tyrannical rule is spreading, aided by their giant mechanized weapons known as Windups. War and oppression are everyday constants for the people of the Badlands, who live under the thumb of their cruel Godolia overlords.
Three days. Two girls. One life-changing music festival.
