Akwaeke Emezi

Our guest for today's episode is Akwaeke Emezi, the author of the new YA novel Pet, which is a finalist for this year's National Book Award for Young People's Literature. Emezi burst onto the literary scene with their novel Freshwater, a powerful story of a young woman inhabited by multiple spirits, and her journey to understanding her many-sided self. Now, writing for Christopher Myers's Make Me a World YA imprint, Akwaeke brings us the story of Jam, a teenager living in the city of Lucille, a community that prides itself on having been through a revolutionary change — one that eliminated what are known as monsters — those who abused, imprisoned, or did violence to others; where a black trans girl like Jam lives in a happy community with her loving parents Bitter and Aloe. But when Jam accidentally invokes the magic that lies dormant in her mother's powerful artwork, a strange being emerges, one that calls itself Pet. Pet is a hunter and it has come, it tells Jam, because there are still monsters in Lucille. I talked with Akwaeke Emezi about this ingenious and spellbinding tale, and their lifetime of making worlds out of story.