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With Brown Girl, Brown Girl, poet Leslé Honoré joins with artist Cozbi A. Cabrera to acknowledge Black and brown girlhood in its challenges and joys and promise. After swapping stories about our favorite Chicago haunts, Leslé and I got down to talking about how the book came to be.

Roger Sutton: Brown Girl, Brown Girl was a poem before it was a picture book, so how did the poem come to be?

Leslé Honoré: The poem came to be on Martin Luther King Day. My girlfriends and our daughters typically go to the Rainbow PUSH Coalition’s MLK breakfast that supports their scholarships. The food is always horrible because it's at a hotel, so we go to breakfast after the Breakfast, at the Original Pancake House in Hyde Park. We are three brown and Black women, three brown and Black girls, and it was a very long wait, and a gentleman there said something that was really colorist and hurtful. Our girls at the time were maybe fifteen. The original poem came from seeing our girls take in, like, “Wow, did this adult say this to us about our skin color?” and the hurt and then me wanting to remind them of the strength and the beauty that comes from their melanin and their heritage.

RS: When was this?

LH: 2016. And then I did a Kickstarter to finance self-publishing my first book of poetry, Fist & Fire, which includes “Brown Girl.”

RS: What was it about poetry that hooked you at such a young age?

LH: Poetry was freedom. I went to Catholic school from kindergarten all the way through college. I attended Xavier University of Louisiana, the only Catholic HBCU. (My mother is from Mexico and my dad was from New Orleans, and you don't get a much more Catholic upbringing than that.) The nuns were very strict about grammar and also very strict about once-a-year talent shows. The first time I wrote a poem and performed it I was six. Anyone who's gone to Catholic school knows there are talent shows at Catholic schools where everyone must do something, and I wish that's how we still were — still focused on ensuring that everybody's going to try this. Just like we try sports or music, everybody's going to get on stage. It gives you respect for people who are on stage, and sometimes it births something in you.

RS: Do you remember that poem?

LH: God, no. I think it was about a bird, but I don’t remember it at all. I honestly don't know how people remember their poetry to recite it! I'm typically doing a reading where I have the poem in front of me. It's not slam poetry; it's really meant to be listened to and to read yourself. I do not have a wonderful memory, and I need lots of teleprompters and notes to help me sound as good as I think the poem should sound.

RS: So is there a difference between slam poetry and spoken-word poetry?

LH: Slam is for competition, so it's that one step right under being a hip-hop lyricist. It is really about rhythm and rhyme and moving a crowd and having them lockstep with what your message is. Spoken-word does not always have to have a rhyme and it's not always in a competitive place. My poetry is pop poetry, I think. It sits at a place in between the academic poetry that people think that they can't understand and that feels very heady and the slam poetry that is meant to be just for that moment and then dissolve into the atmosphere. I'm typically writing about things that are happening right now, almost like live tweeting a world event that we are all experiencing together as human beings, and I write about it through the lens of a brown and Black woman and what I’ve experienced in my life. I try to write about things really quickly. If something happens, I'll stop a conversation, I will pull over in the car. I used to have a notebook with me all the time; now I use the notes app on my phone. If I can get something out within an hour, I'm really proud of myself. If it takes me a day to process my thoughts, I'm a bit bummed. I like being quick about it — just recording how I feel and how my community is feeling.

RS: And how much revision goes into that afterward?

LH: Not a lot. Because once I start to overthink it, I begin to pick it apart, and anybody who writes knows you can revise all day. It's never done; you'll always find something you want to add or take away, and when I'm trying to capture something in the moment I try not to do that. Sometimes my followers will inbox me with “We noticed this misspelling” or “Did you mean this? It's kind of a grammatical play.” And sometimes I say, “Oh, thank you for the catch” and other times it’s, “No, that is exactly what I meant."

RS: Or it was a mistake, but you say, "Oh yes, I am so clever, aren’t I!"

LH: I have had a moment or two like that. I once put “think air” instead of “thin air” in a poem and someone asked, "Don't you mean thin?” And I said, “No, I mean think air. The air we think in and where we create stuff.”

RS: Okay, you're writing them down from the beginning, so you're creating line breaks from the beginning? How do you decide when to stop one line and start another one?

LH: Usually, it's when there's an end of a thought or an end of a phrasing, or if I'm writing something where there's a change of speaker. But the confines of Instagram limit me a bit, and it's challenged me to do things more concisely. In the beginning I would write very long poems, but you only have so much that you can post on Instagram, so I’d need to make adjustments. I'm not economical with my words enough to ever be on Twitter, or X or whatever it’s called. I need many more characters. But some of those constraints have created a formula for me: I know this is the length, and when it goes beyond that no one's listening anyway. I want to get it as condensed and as punchy as possible.

RS: On Facebook pretty much every day I post a photograph that I’ve taken on my morning walk and a quote from a poem that I feel goes with it. And I was frustrated with Instagram because I couldn't really do that — it doesn't allow you to format line breaks the same way that Facebook does.

LH: Sometimes there will be a discrepancy between the way a poem will look on my Facebook page and on Instagram and in print, and it's frustrating because I don't want it to change the rhythm or the emotional ride that we're having. I've tailored a lot to Instagram constraints so that everything is more uniform. Social media is a double-edged sword, isn't it?

RS: You have quite a following.

LH: Isn’t it bananas? I'm always shocked that people are reading poetry and sharing it and even sometimes getting angry about it. I love when someone is angry about something I've written, and they call me all kinds of terrible names. I just giggle and say, “Well, you read it. You read the poem from beginning to end. It made you feel something. It made you think about something. I think I won.” That makes them even more upset. Our world is full of contradictions. It’s both beautiful and ugly, and sometimes they hold space at the same time, and I'm always blown away that there are people who will say, “I was waiting to see what you were going to say about that” or “I knew you were going to say what I felt.” I'm blown away, and it reminds me how connected we are. I think that's beautiful, and I wish more of us could feel that.

RS: There’s such a difference between publishing poetry in a book and publishing poetry on the internet where you have an audience responding immediately.

LH: I love it, and I love when I do a reading to be able to bring that audience response into the space as well. The Q&A is my favorite part of a reading. I love to have that discourse with people. To know what they felt. To know how it landed. Sometimes they see patterns I didn't even know I was making. I love to feel, especially when I'm writing about something like an election or a tragedy, that we all are impacted and that I'm representing their voices. It's not just about me. Very rarely will I write an “I” poem. It's almost always “we,” always in the spirit of community. I like the feedback. It's gotten me through some dark times knowing that this is my purpose and I'm lucky enough to be able to walk in it.

RS: Let's talk about you moving into this new sphere of children’s picture books. How did it happen?

LH: That was a miracle, a once-in-a-lifetime thing. It was maybe a couple of days after the 2020 election, and we were all waiting with bated breath to see when the Electoral College votes would finally come in. I was in the car with my oldest daughter, Sage, and we got calls from some of my friends and they were like, "We did it, it's official, we will have the first Black and brown daughter of an immigrant woman as vice president!" My daughter said, “Pull over, you know you want to write about it.” I parked the car, but the only thing that kept coming to mind was “Brown Girl, Brown Girl.” I tweaked the poem to make it a bit lighter. I’d seen a great picture that Vice President Harris's niece Meena posted of one of her daughters sitting on the vice president's lap, and I thought, “Oh, that's perfect.” I posted it, and we went about our day, and then the heavens opened up. It went supernova. There were newspapers in India that were covering the poem. There were teachers in New York who were using it as Words of Affirmation. I started to get videos from parents reciting it. There was a beautiful video of a young lady doing it in ASL — it gave me chills. The response was overwhelming. And then I got a message from my now-agent Johanna Castillo asking me if I had or would I want representation. I thought, Are you kidding me? It's any writer's dream to be represented. If you're a poet, you don't think it's going to happen. You don't think you're going to get into traditional markets because you have to do that through rigorous academic publications or workshopping, and when I started, I was a very young mom. I survived a marriage fraught with domestic violence. My road was not this straight line from college to writer.

RS: So not much time for writer's conferences or networking.

LH: Exactly. It was just me and my journal. Just writing and occasionally going to open mics and just trying to hold on to it for a little bit. Anyway, Johanna was trying to sell me and she was like, "I’m with Writer’s House." I said, “I already know who you are! MLK’s estate is with you guys; Octavia Butler's estate is with you guys.” I lost it. I couldn't catch my breath. And the next message I got in my Instagram inbox was from Farrin Jacobs, who was then at Little, Brown, saying, “What do you think about making this into a children's book?” Honestly, Farrin and Johanna were instrumental. They changed my life and the lives of my children. Then other publishers started reaching out. I was pinching myself after every call and just could not believe that this was the poem, this was the story, this was the path to my work being published. We stayed with Little, Brown for many reasons. Farrin Jacobs is a wonderful editor, but she also really took her time with me and held my hand and sat in joy with me and was the only one that wanted to do two books. In 2026 My Brown Boy will be my second children's book with Little, Brown.

RS: When you wrote the poem were you aware of the children's book allusion in its opening lines to the picture book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?

LH: It's something that we all know. I read it to my kids. But it wasn't until Joanna brought up that the beginning harkens back to Brown Bear that I thought, Well, I guess it does. If that book taught us about colors and animals, I hope this book teaches us about representation; I hope it teaches about sisterhood; I hope it teaches about possibilities. So if that is an association, I think it's a beautiful one.

RS: What was it like seeing your words illustrated?

LH: I received the first set of pencil illustrations on my daughter's twenty-first birthday. We all gathered around the computer, and it was like time stopped. We are a very artistic family — my oldest daughter is a painter and teaches art, my youngest son is a sculptor — and art in all its forms is so important to us. So to see those sketches as a family was mind-blowing. It was really, really important to me that we hit the note that any person who identifies as a brown girl would be able to open the book and find a representation of themselves. Being both Black and Mexican, there's a range of brown that comes with diaspora, with Afro Latinos, with my Creole heritage. I have Black family members who have blue eyes and blonde hair and family members who have dark mahogany skin, and we are all from the same family. Growing up not always seeing these versions of ourselves in books, I wanted that more than anything else. I wanted the pages to be so beautiful that parents would rip them out and frame them. And I wanted any kiddo to be able to point and say, "That looks just like me, that's my hair or that's my nose or that's my skin." All during the process my North Star was “How much representation can we get in these pages?”

RS: Yes, and I saw that Cozbi A. Cabrera got Kamala Harris into the art even though she's not named in the poem.

LH: That's one of my favorite pages. There was a spread planned for the book with beautiful faces of brown and Black women who have impacted our history. We went back and forth about who should be there. When I got the final version and my mom was included, that was big. She's right next to Angela Davis. I was so happy to see Vice President Harris; I was thrilled to see Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who recently read one of my poems in a graduation speech.

RS: Wow!

LH: It's been a beautiful, beautiful unfolding of a goodness that I didn't see coming, but I'm so glad it did. That spread also includes Dolores Huerta and Buffy Sainte-Marie and Malala Yousafzai and Amanda Gorman — women from different parts of the world who were limited because of their identity and continued on and opened space for other people to dream bigger. I loved seeing them all there.

RS: Well, welcome to our world. I think you're going to like it here in children's books.

LH: I hope you guys let me stay. I'm overwhelmed with delight and gratitude. It is a magical place, isn't it? Books hold our everything. I think heaven smells like old books. They're all of our knowledge and our hopes and our dreams and our sorrows and our musings. I can't believe that it's my turn. I'm going to go to Target and Barnes & Noble and my books are going to be there. Hopefully some kid will be able to buy my book at the Scholastic Book Fair with their allowance money that they're waiting to use the way I did, and my kids did. I could just cry. Like, what?!

RS: I think one thing that can happen with your book is it's almost like a jump-rope rhyme and it’s very easy to stick one's head in, so you are going to hear little kids who have memorized it.

LH: The footage that we got when NPR ran the story and just hearing girl after girl recite it...more chills. It is just mind-blowing. There is a school here in Chicago, Chase Elementary, that has a high population of kids with differing abilities, and I've been going and reading to them for four or five years. So they've been on the journey of the book with me. Whenever I go talk to them, I'll have six or seven microphones for kids for whom my words will go right into their cochlear implants and kids doing sign language and kids with cognitive delays and physical differences. And to be there with them in the moment is awesome, to hear their different interpretations of the book and to talk about it. They ask really great questions about publishing, which I think is hilarious, but I love that they're thinking about it. And it means everything to know that they feel seen. What else could you want if you help a kiddo feel special about themselves?

RS: That’s the dream.

LH: There's nothing better.

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