Author Nick Brooks has a comfortable relationship with adversity.
He can live in it knowing that he’ll find a way out often due to his superpower, putting words together and creating stories.
After graduating from Howard undergrad, Brooks became an educator in the Teach for America program. He remembers being unimpressed with the reading material his 5-year-old students were consuming. Their books were supposed to teach them preparedness, attentiveness, thoughtfulness, and the rewards of working hard. In Brook’s humble opinion, reading about how Spot ran across the street wasn’t getting his kids to the goal post.
Brooks, who wrote the award-winning Promise Boys, pitched the idea to write books that better laddered into those core tenants for his charter school. That pitch for what became his Adventures of Yani series resulted in his kids having better material that promoted the program’s mission. Other students and parents took notice of how Brooks’ books expanded and improved the vocabulary of his students. As a result, his books were rolled out to other charter schools across various states.
Brooks, a USC film school alumnus who has had his books optioned, returns to the publishing space with his next long-read, Up In Smoke. Unlike most multi-hyphenates, Brooks can also rap and is crafting an album to accompany the release. The album will deliver clues to who committed a murder that occurs at a Black Lives Matter rally in the book.
LEVEL sat with with Brooks to discuss his writing journey and what his five-year-old self found so intriguing about DMX’s It’s Dark and Hell is Hot.
Every writer has an origin story. What’s yours, Nick?
I started writing as a kid. I never forget trying to make my first comic book in second grade, trying to figure it out. I've always been a storyteller. I look at building a story like puzzle pieces.
Tell me about that first comic.
Man, it was second grade. It was called Dino Land — literally Dragon Tales before Dragon Tales but a much darker version. It was about a brother and sister who gets sucked into a sandbox and come out on the other side in a dinosaur world. My grandmother, God bless her soul, was like, ‘Nicholas, we got to get this copywritten.’ At an early age, she was probably the only person who understood the power of the arts. My mom was a very practical woman, so as I grew up, the arts wasn't necessarily something she supported. She didn't discourage me, but it wasn't her thing. My grandmother was something different. And her enthusiasm around what I had did in that moment, in retrospect, helped me on my artistic journey.
What was your mother like?
My mom was a great parent. She was a young mom, so she was pregnant in high school. She was a hustler. I remember her going to community college classes with me. I've never seen people bring their kids to school. After she went to Prince Georges County Community College for a few years she transferred to Howard. When I hit about nine or 10, she remarried and started a new family. In some ways that was traumatic for me because my mom was all I had all of these years. It was just me and her.
Did she get more supportive of your artistic endeavors as you got older?
No, not at all. She got more practical. Again, it wasn't something she discouraged. She was like, "okay, all of that stuff is cool, but you got to go to college." I think it all worked out fine, but it wasn't a thing she poured into.
You’re very aware of culture and Black history. Tell me about your school, Roots.
Roots is an African center school in DC established to teach kids knowledge of self from an early age. We celebrate Kwanza. You can't celebrate Halloween unless you come to school dressed as an ancestor.
It's funny, I was in Dallas and there was an older white woman at one of my tables. She wrote a book on critical race theory, and the biggest lies we've been told about the Civil War. I asked her what the biggest lies were. She said the biggest lie that we've been taught is that the Civil War was not fought over slavery. That's so crazy because I was never taught that lie. I've always known that it was fought over slavery.
I asked her what’s the second biggest lie. She said the second biggest lie that we were told is that reconstruction was a failure. And again, I'm like, I was never taught that. I was always taught that black people thrived during reconstruction. That's when we were really building communities, which is why they were burned down.
You’re a big fan of DMX’s It’s Dark and Hell is Hot. What’s going on in your life when this album came out?
I didn't get to see my dad a lot but when I did the two things that he was into was hip-hop and movies. And so that's all we did. I just remember how visceral the music was, how emotional. My grandfather was a pastor. And so it was interesting to me to hear DMX praying. It was the only music that I heard outside of gospel that connected to exactly what my grandfather would be doing on Sundays. And I spent a lot of time with my grandfather.
You’ve said that you saw a lot at the age of 5. What were you seeing?
This is the early nineties, so it is just after the peak of the crack epidemic and DC is the murder capital at this time. I’m living with a single mom. We'd come home and it'd be crack heads in the house, just broke in. It became a thing where my mom would just be like, "all right, let's wait till they go. Let's just step aside." She would call 911 and we would wait till they leave. That sort of thing.
After your Adventures of Yani series takes off and the adoption by schools is on autopilot what happens next?
I saw Fruitville Station and it struck me. That was about Oscar Grant, but at this time, black men were getting killed all over the place. This was on the heels of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, all of this is happening. I was like, yo, who made this movie? I see Ryan Coogler [made it] and then I heard him speak. It was the first times a filmmaker at that level made me feel like I could be a filmmaker too, because before that, you had Spike and John [Singleton] but they seemed out of reach.
I was like, how did he get there? He had said his background wasn't in filmmaking. Mine wasn't either. And so I saw he went to film school out in California, went to grad school. And so it was like, okay, I'll do that. So I applied to the same school, made my first short film because in order to get in, you had to make a movie. The first short film that I made did phenomenally well, it placed in Forbes’ 30 under 30. It won a bunch of other small film festival awards and just had a big splash online. This film not only got me into USC but I also earned a full ride from George Lucas.
How did you find your way back to making books?
A kid that I had met at USC, he was a novelist, and he told me about some of the money he was making. And so when the pandemic hit, I hit him up and I was like, ‘I'm about to just start writing. I just need to write every day. And also it was anxiety, just feeling like I need to do something to take my mind off all this other shit that's going on. I start writing every single day. I’m starting to make music again.
I get a call from my book agent who says, "Hey, we think we have a buyer for one of your books." And at that time, it was a novel about kids. It was like ET for black kids. That turned into a three-book deal. I sold that series and that was great. But I had also been working on Promise Boys, which is based on a lot of my experience as an educator working with at-risk boys in DC. I get a call a few months later from the agent, Nick, saying the town's going crazy over Promise Boys and they have a bunch of meetings lined up. So it became a bidding war. Again, I'm a year out of film school. I'm working as an assistant on this big show. My wife had just had our twin daughters.
There’s a lot going on.
I sit down and she tells me what McMillan offered to do a preempt, which is basically to take a book off [the market]. It was seven figures.
How far has the project gotten?
When we think we're about to start writing the show — well we actually wrote the pilot and turned it in — the writers strike happens.Budgets get slashed, people are getting fired. It killed all the momentum. Not only did we have Promise, but me and my co-writer, had also sold a show to CW. When the strikes were lifted, we found out CW folded, they're not doing scripted content anymore. So now that show is gone. We also found out our execs at Netflix had either quit or were let go. They didn't give us the full scope, but now that's in limbo.
I just started writing my next book, which eventually became Up in Smoke.
How did you land on the idea of creating an album that’s an extension of Up in Smoke?
TV had slowed down and financiers weren’t really taking meetings, like they were. So again, I had a little bit of time on my hands, I started making music and [thought] what if I made an album to go with my next book? It's a dual POV book. What if I made an album that was a third POV, and the rap album had clues to the murder in the book?
You've talked about the importance of language when you're writing your books. Can you explain why and what that is?
Yeah. For a few different reasons. One, it goes back to why I connected with DMX, right? Or it is why somebody connects to a James Baldwin or Maya Angelou. I think language is really tied to culture. And so for me, my whole thing is about writing books where the kids that I work with and taught feel seen. You can do different things in a book to make them feel seen. But of course, the number one way to do that is language. And so for me, it's really important to be tapped into culture, to be tapped into language and speaking in a way that's going to connect with these readers and these kids. And at the same time, informing the kid from Utah.
I travel all over the country speaking with kids, and you don't have to be a black and brown kid to appreciate the language in the book, but it is something that I'm intentional about because I am writing these for what you would call a reluctant reader. And again, I was just in Dallas talking with librarians, and they say it all the time, man, our boys sometimes do not want to read or they don't think a book is for them. So that's why it's important to have that shared language so that when they're reading the book, they can identify with it off the first page. It sounds just as if their homie was speaking to 'em,
With the book out what’s the next creative itch you’re looking to scratch?
Working on my first video game [Grand Theft Auto 6], working on my graphic novel, I'm doing a bunch of different things. I truly feel like, if given the opportunity, I could be one of the leaders of the new school. I look like at Ryan and Issa and Lena, and even, I guess Jordan would be in their class, Jordan Peele, even though he's a little older and Donald Glover [as a class]., We all look up to those cats.
That next wave is Morgan Cooper who did Bel Air, right. He's doing his thing. You got Quinta, right? That's a class of its own. They're doing their thing. And so after that I feel likevthere's going to be another group. And I could be one of those guys in that group.