Amber McBride’s heroes wield pens. 

Known for writing young adult novels of great substance and style while navigating difficult topics with grace, National Book Award finalist Amber McBride traces much of her creative confidence and clarity to her mentors, most of them Black women, and to an event over a decade ago that proved it sometimes pays to meet your idols. 

On a single day in 2012, McBride, then just 23, met a constellation of literary luminaries she had long looked up to. Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, and Sonia Sanchez had gathered at James Madison University for “Sheer Good Fortune,” a tribute to Morrison organized by Nikki Giovanni and McBride’s mentor, the sponsor of her postgraduate internship at the Furious Flower Poetry Center, Dr. Joanne Gabbin. Through Gabbin, these superstars all knew McBride’s name and that she had just completed an MFA. They wanted to know what she was working on now. She explained that she had “kind of stopped” writing after a alienating experience in the grad program. She described a sense of being ground down by it: “I had not lost my voice, but definitely had just been put down so much.” To a woman, the authors responded, “Why?” “Why do you give a fuck what people say about what you write? It gets published. It doesn’t. You still wrote it. It’s for you.” That resounding chorus recentered and refueled McBride, made her feel defiant. She thought, If I have these women telling me this, why do I care what anyone else has to say? 

In the ensuing decade, after two rejected books, McBride secured an agent and wrote and sold her debut publication, Me (Moth), a novel in verse that would win the Coretta Scott King Award and become a finalist for the National Book Award. Another book,Gone Wolf, won the Los Angeles Times Prize for young adult literature in 2024. McBride’s seventh book, The Leaving Room (Feiwel & Friends, October 14), centers a girl who is the keeper of memories in the transition between life and death for those who die young. We recently spoke to McBride by video call from her home in Virginia. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve written middle-grade and YA novels, as well as poetry for adults. How do you match the storytelling, the narrative voice, and the content to the audience? 

I’ve studied poetry, I understand poetry, and I don’t dumb down my poetry. If I don’t think that my prose or verse is something I’d want adults to read, then I’m not going to publish it for young adults either. So for me it’s more, How are we handling things? If I’m talking about mental health, I probably wouldn’t put a suicide on the page for a young adult. We have to be more creative in the way that we show difficult topics.

But also, you don’t want your book to get banned. You don’t want to start with something that could be like a bomb. So there’s sensitivity in thinking about my reader: Is this going to be too much? 

For example, in We’re All So Good at Smiling, one of the characters self-harms. Instead of saying, “He cuts his skin,” there’s a line in there, “I don’t trust my own hands with my skin,” which implies what he’s doing. There’s a little bit more up for interpretation when I talk about difficult topics for young adults and middle grade. It’s knowing that these kids can handle this, but they also might not have the language to talk about it yet. So let’s do this in a more nuanced kind of way. 

Just like, with The Leaving Room, the way we’re talking about death or near-death experiences, or realizing that you might be queer. It’s a bit more subtle but still holds the same weight as what would happen in adult [fiction]. I come with a level of empathy with young people that I don’t always come with to adults, because I know that I might be their introduction into something.

You mentioned book banning. How has that played a part in your consciousness? 

You can breathe wrong and your book could be banned, so I don’t really think about it when I’m writing. Now when we talk about my book Gone Wolf—which is about a president who doesn’t think he lost an election, separates from the Northern states, and re-institutionalizes a new form of enslavement—I already knew that was going to be a problem. So I wasn’t too worried. You’ve got to write the book that feels right at the time.

The worry comes with the fact that often the books that get banned are the books for readers who need them and might not have access. I want my books to be in libraries. I want my readers to have access. But as far as censoring myself, I try not to, unless it’s [about] something like mental health that I really wanted to make sure wasn’t pulled off the shelves.

When I was doing school visits for We’re All So Good at Smiling, the one about depression, I remember one kid—this gets me every time—one of them raised their hand and said, “Why is the title We’re All So Good at Smiling?” And I said, “Aren’t we? Aren’t we all just smiling through and pretending that we’re fine?” And he asked me, “Why do you think we do that? It’s exhausting.” So even as a teenager, you’re already thinking it’s exhausting—how much I have to act for my parents, for my peers, for my teachers, and how that weight is just going to keep holding, being on top of your shoulders. I wanted that book to be in schools. So I didn’t go into self-harm and the aspects of depression that might have made it more controversial. But when it comes to political things, I just don’t care.

What is inspiring you now?

When I talk about my art now, I’m very inspired by music. I’ve been a ballet and modern dancer for 18 years. So music, art, movies, television, that’s where I get most inspired. I love singer-songwriters. Hozier is one of my favorite artists. Lyrically, Kendrick Lamar. I’ll sit down with the lyrics and I’ll be like, Why can’t I write like that? It’s like when you listen to a song and you get goosebumps. I often think, as a writer, how can I make those goosebumps happen on the page? 

I’m 50,000 words into writing an adult gothic novel. I saw Sinners, and there was a story in my head that I didn’t realize I needed to write. And also there’s hoodoo in it! It got me so excited. I got home, sat with my notebook. I wrote out an entire plot idea, named the characters, then went to my whiteboard. That’s the kind of thing that gets me inspired—excellence and pushing boundaries makes me feel like I can do that, too. It reminds me specifically when Black artists do that, that I can do that too.

Carole V. Bell is a Florida-based writer, researcher, and professor.