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One of the most fascinating voices coming from Bay Area writers and poets under the age of 25 belongs to Leila Mottley. After establishing sturdy local groundwork as the 2018 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate, the 22-year-old from Oakland exploded out of the gate with her debut novel Nightcrawling (Penguin Random House.) Widespread recognition of this nearly perfect tome with a captivating, singular voice and command of content, character, plot, and story structure arrived swiftly. It became a New York Times bestseller, an Oprah’s Book Club selection, and was long-listed for the 2022 Booker Prize.
Nightcrawling is based on an amalgamation of true stories and scalds with its teenaged protagonist’s exposure to serial sexual abuse, police corruption, social injustice, and poverty. Mottley’s profile of Black girlhood wrenched the hearts of many readers. The book’s glowing accolades focused on the author’s blend of clarity, power, courage, raw pain, exuberant love, joy—and reasons for survival and hope.
It would have been easy, or expected, for Mottley to crank out novel #2 and ride the wave. Instead, she pulled back; returning to her earlier focus on poetry and spoken word. The result is woke up no light, a collection of poems visiting, exploring and exposing the vicissitudes and victories of Black girl’s and women’s lives. Dividing the poems into four sections—girlhood, neighborhood, falsehood, and womanhood—Mottley swings through the historical and contemporary histories of being Black and identifying as female in America.
The titles alone suggest whole worlds of possibilities: “what a Black girl wants,” “The Fifth Girl of Birmingham,” “Crow Call,” “Elegy for a body that once called itself mine,” “what to do when you see a Black woman cry,” “poem for a reckoning day,” and more. In several poems, personal, political, ancestral or historical declarations seem to fuse or talk to each other. Laid on the page, the words sometimes line up in expected stanzas or couplets, but often enough, one poem condenses into a chunky block of text, a brief, grocery-list style presentation, or stretches out and scatters into single words or sentence fragments with empty spaces representing silence or perhaps, an opportunity for readers to chose the order in which words are read.
It’s a masterful collection for a creator of any age.
If somehow Mottley has evaded your radar, saddle up immediately. Her second novel is scheduled to arrive in June 2025. Hopefully, more poems will follow.
LEILA MOTTLEY for more information, go here.
