Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Akilah Brown. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Akilah thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

I think I knew I wanted to become a writer after reading my first Sweet Valley High (Francine Pascal) book. I had always been a voracious reader, and my entrée into series fiction had been The Baby-Sitters Club (Ann M. Martin), but the Sweet Valley High series was the first series I read that had all the high drama of the soap operas I watched with my mom and grandmother in book form and in a way that seemed accessible to me. I wanted to be a person who created the same kind of world for readers.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m a blogger, multi-genre storyteller, and professor. I was raised in the Washington, DC area where I lived before I got into a master’s program at Iowa State University and then a PhD program at the University of Florida. I lived in Florida for eleven years before making my west to Los Angeles where I currently reside. For the past twenty-five years, I’ve been launching a human into the world as a single mother while also pursuing my professional goals. Now that my daughter is a full adult and I have achieved tenure at my institution, I finally have the stability I’ve needed to more aggressively pursue creative endeavors.

I got into creative writing as a teenager. I used to sit in my mother’s home office late at night, click, click, clicking away at her keyboard as I built a world for an ongoing saga about four friends. However, it wasn’t until undergrad that I took my first creative writing class and then found out I could study creative writing as a discipline.

It was also around this time I got into blogging back during the big online diary push, more specifically with LiveJournal. I used that service for years before going more public with my blogging on my current site. Blogging has been a great tool for me to hone my voice and to practice my craft. I started my public blog with the intention of being a book blogger, but found that I couldn’t help but share personal anecdotes and observations I had. Writing is a way that I make sense of the world and all of the things I’m thinking and having a blog is a way for me to do that publicly so that I can also see/hear how other people make sense of the world as well.

While my first graduate degree was in creative writing, my next phase of graduate school did not have a creative writing focus, which for me, depleted a lot of the brain space that I used for fiction writing. Once I began teaching writing full-time, I found that it was a lot harder to write creatively than I thought it would be. I used to feel bad about this until I read Stephen King’s memoir On Writing, and he talked about how hard it was for him to write when he taught high school English. There’s a level of creativity that goes into teaching and then a lot of brain power that goes into grading essays that seems to hit those same pathways that creative writing does, especially for me as a prose writer. I don’t think it’s talked about a lot, but I think the combination of that along with raising a child on my own really took more out of me than I expected. Again, blogging did offer me a writing outlet that I needed, even if it was not the kind of writing I expected to be doing (fiction).

Along with blogging, I do write fiction in the form of short stories and novels as well as screenplays. My main focus is realistic young adult literature with a focus on teen girls and their friendships and familial relationships. More specifically, I am most interested in and most inspired by slice of life stories that show girls and women that the minutiae of their daily lives and relationships matter and are worthy of being told.

As a professor and blogger, I am most interested in helping people find their authentic voice and understanding that they don’t have to sound like anyone else but themselves. I do some editorial consulting work, and that is the focus of that part of my business, and in the resume/business coaching I do, that’s also something I focus on. This goes back to my personal mission with writing about girls and women knowing that the minutiae of their daily lives matter. I often sit with students/clients who know they are qualified for something but can’t articulate it and that’s because the work they do as nannies or au pairs or [insert typically female-driven job/industry here] has been minimized or they’ve been taught that if they haven’t entered the Hunger Games to save their family that their stories aren’t worth being told, and I really want to show the high drama of regular life and how it impacts us all the time.

I am most proud of, of course, raising a wonderful human, but I am also most proud of the fact that I keep showing up for myself, enough so that I became a 2023 writing fellow for the Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency and that I haven’t given up on my dream of writing even as I have faced—I wouldn’t necessarily call them setbacks so let’s just say even as I have faced the realities of being a single mother and an academic in a career that also demands creativity.

The main things I want potential clients/followers/fans to know about me/my brand/my work/ etc. are that I try to write from a place of honesty and authenticity, that I try to encourage that same writing in my students and clients, and that I believe that storytelling—either through fiction or blogging—is the way I make sense of the world.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

The best thing society can do to support artists, creatives, and a thriving creative income system is, I think, just to make sure everyone’s basic needs are met. That means a universal basic income, universal health care, housing, food, etc. There also needs to be a commitment to funding the arts and the humanities, especially in public schools and at public universities. Regardless of whether or not a person is an artist, the arts and humanities teach us so much about history and culture and contextualizes the art that people continue to do.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

I mentioned before the Stephen King anecdote about how difficult it was for him, one of the most prolific writers, to write when he taught high school English, and I think that’s tied to the biggest lesson I had to unlearn. I have been taught in many different ways and by many different people that in order to be a writer, I had to be writing every day or every week or continuously. I felt like if I hadn’t been doing that, I wasn’t doing anything toward my goals. As a fiction writer, that was an unrealistic expectation to put on myself. When I was applying for fellowships this past year, I remember looking at my creative output (stories, specifically) and was shocked that I hadn’t written anything since leaving my creative writing program in 2006. I even asked out loud, “What have I been doing?” And the reality is that I was raising a child, launching a career, and also I had been writing, just not in the ways that I considered would count towards fiction. Except now I know that’s not true. I have to give myself credit for everything I do. So maybe I wasn’t working on a novel or a collection of short stories during that time, but I was keeping a blog, I did complete a couple of drafts of screenplays, and, you know, I was also raising a person. In my current project, a lot of the things I dealt with in therapy or with my family or my friends are showing up so those things are always working on my subconscious and providing fodder for the writing I can do now. So, yes, the biggest lesson I had to unlearn is that writing has to look a specific way or tick a specific box or be done in a specific way so I could learn to give myself credit for what I actually have done or am doing.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://theakilahbrown.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theakilahbrown/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/THEakilahbrown
• Other: Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/175272-akilah Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/THEakilahbrown/