When Ayana Gray’s second novel hits shelves this summer, the 29-year-old author will enter a rarefied space: that of the franchise. Her debut, “Beasts of Prey,” headed straight for the New York Times Best Sellers list for young adult hardcover upon its release in late 2021. The second installment, “Beasts of Ruin,” offers another almost-500-page adventure for (ravenous) readers to follow the young animal keeper Koffi and the warrior Ekon through a realm of magic, lower-case-g gods, jungles and dangers. Notably, like Gray, her characters are Black, and the pan-African world she built for them is a refreshing departure from the traditionally Eurocentric visions of monsters and heroes.
For Gray, who moved to Little Rock from Atlanta as a young teen, and who calls Little Rock home now, the rise from a total unknown — pitching her epic in 2019 via a Twitter hashtag — has been meteoric. That fateful tweet got her an agent; the agent got her a deal with Putnam. “A dazzling debut,” Kirkus called “Beasts of Ruin.” Netflix agreed and snagged it into development for a feature film. In a very short order, the University of Arkansas grad went from studying historical power struggles in a tower of Old Main to becoming a power player herself.
To follow her on Instagram or on Tiktok, where Gray shows off an obvious knack for wit and timing, you’d assume she was born for the spotlight. (You might also assume from her given Twitter location, Wakanda, that she isn’t in the 501. Rest assured, she’s around.) Rather, the self-described introvert is hitting her stride only after years of rudderless solitude that forced her to write her way through, drawing from her experiences in Little Rock, Fayetteville and Ghana to spin undiscovered worlds.
I reached Gray via Zoom to talk man-eating lions, book sales during a pandemic, her dog Dolly, and the exotic land that is Arkansas, perpetually mystifying America at large.
Why’d you move from Atlanta?
My dad had originally gotten a job in Little Rock. I went to Pulaski Academy and just had a really good academic experience that set me very much on the path. I had really smart friends at PA, and it pushed me to be a better student. I was reluctant to come, but everything about my life now is because of that move.
As a teenager, were you thinking about becoming an author?
I knew I was a writer. I didn’t know I was an author. I grew up during the YA boom. So “Twilight,” Harry Potter, “The Maze Runner,” “Hunger Games.” It was a cool time to be a teenager who loved books. And I was writing, but the idea of being a full-time author? I’m the oldest and I was in a middle-class family that was like, go to college, get a job. I didn’t know that I would be able to ever sustain myself just writing.
What brought you to the U of A?
I applied to 19 colleges. ’Cause I had nothing better to do.
Apparently because you’re a writer and you like writing applications and that’s just what you do.
I felt a tremendous pressure — like, where I go to school is going to dictate the trajectory of my life. And it did. I applied to 19 schools. I got into 18 of them. I remember distinctly, April 2011, I didn’t know where I was gonna go to school. And I got a phone call from Dr. Charles Robinson. He was head of the multicultural affairs office at the time. He said, “Have you made a decision?” And I said no. And he was like, “Well, I tell you what, if you come to U of A, we will take care of you.” That really struck me and had a big impression on me. No other school had done that.
That does seem like a powerful gesture from an administrator.
Between the financial aid — no other school was really that competitive in that regard — and that, I decided to go there. And there’s a stigma around going to big state universities, but it ended up being great in the honors program.
People who know writing know the U of A. How did that academic experience set you up for what came after?
I studied political science and African and African American studies. I loved discussing ideas of power. My focus specifically was political violence about power, how people gain power, how they take it away, how they justify taking it away. There are so many stories embedded in that. And I had the chance to study abroad on a month-long program in Ghana. We stayed in Accra, the capital, and saw five-star hotels and restaurants, but we also went out to really rural areas, no running water, no electricity, and took bucket showers. We’d go and see parliament, and then we’d go and see these huge nature reserves and elephants in the wild. And then we’d go to these historic places like the place where a lot of slaves had their last bath before they were put on ships, the castles and the dungeons where slaves were kept. That experience had a huge impact on my writing, on how I viewed my space in the world as a Black woman.
On the poli sci side, I took a colloquium from the honors college. My professor that taught it, Dr. Jeff Ryan, handpicks 10 students every other year to meet in one of the towers of Old Main for three hours once a week. We read books about political violence, about dictators, about genocide, these really heavy topics. And we discussed. That was the first time in my life that I realized, “Oh, good and evil are not as clean-cut as we are taught.” We would go in thinking this dictator or this terrorist was a horrible person. Dr. Ryan has this way of asking the right questions to be like, “Well, are you honestly saying that if in these circumstances you can’t empathize?”
For a fiction writer, empathizing is the whole game in some ways, right? Figuring out these characters who inhabit your world and how you come to identify with them.
Whoever has the power is the person who controls the narrative, which seems obvious. But as a kid, if someone you trust tells you something, this person is good, this person is bad, you just trust it. You don’t think about their place in power or the other perspective in that.
How did you get started on the novel, then?
Um, existential crisis?
We all have one of those now and again.
I wanted to be a lawyer. And then halfway through college, I became very disillusioned with the U.S. justice system. My idea that I can go in and be — again, this idea of good and evil, I can be the, the good guy, I can put the bad guys away — and understanding that the U.S. justice system puts a lot of people who are not the bad guy in jail. Lets a lot of the bad guys go. I just became very disillusioned.
For the first time in my entire life, I didn’t have a plan. I retreated into the one thing I did know, which was writing. I started writing this story. I didn’t know where it was going, but it made me happy to be in that world and not think about the fact that I’m 22 and I don’t have a plan, you know?
When did you start seeing it as something to maybe sell and build a career around?
I moved to Florida, for a job at the University of Florida. And I lived somewhere where I had no community. I didn’t know anyone. And so I found the writing community on Twitter. I found an event called #DVpit, where you literally pitch your book through a tweet with a hashtag. If an agent likes that tweet, that’s them saying, ‘Hey, please send this to me.’
I found out about it in 2018. I contacted the creator of #DVpit. I said, “When is the next one?” And she said, “It’s gonna be in April of 2019.” So for the first time in my life, I had a real deadline. I was like, “I have to finish this book I’ve been working on for four years by the second tweet.”
April 2019 came around and I tweeted. I closed my phone and I was like, “I’m not gonna look at this. I’ll be happy if a single agent sees this.” And a friend of mine was like, “Have you looked at your Twitter?” I had gotten a lot of love and support. I got very lucky because I pitched right after one of the really big episodes of “Game of Thrones.” I pitched my story as Black Arya Stark plus “King of Scars.” That’s how I got the agent interest.
I love the idea of world-building in this pan-African space, because everything else seems to take place in some version of England. Even for “Game of Thrones,” George R.R. Martin was pulling from the War of the Roses. How did you start envisioning what this new place could be?
At that time I had not seen a ton of epic fantasy that centered Black people. Or if it did, it had to have a theme of oppression and racism. When I turn on the news, I have to deal with some sort of racially based trauma, and I’m kind of over it. From history there’s a story called the Tsavo man eaters — if you’ve ever heard of the movie “The Ghost in the Darkness”? Tsavo is a region in Kenya. It was a real thing that happened. Two male lions were attacking railroad workers as they were trying to build a railroad. It was almost paranormal because male lions typically don’t hunt. They certainly don’t hunt together. And they were not necessarily doing it for food. They were just killing. And they were impossible to kill.
What a good monster movie, right?
Oh, it was, it’s a great movie. The railroad workers were in tents and every night for months, they knew these male lions were going to come into the camp and kill someone. I just thought about, like, the utter terror you would live with. And I expanded it. So what if there was a city that lived with this constant fear that something’s going to come out of the jungle every night and kill people? And how would that change the culture of a city? You’d need to have warriors to protect them and they would be revered. My mind just starts snowballing.
Every author has that dream of hitting it big. Are there moments that stand out from that journey?
Selling a book in the midst of not only a pandemic, but also in the midst of civil unrest, it was a life raft. There were people protesting outside my window. At the time, my spouse and I had been separated because of COVID and we were in the middle of an immigration process — we went a year without seeing each other. And I was isolated at home. There was a point where I had not hugged anyone in like four months. It was a very grim time. I thought, “Nobody wants this weird story about two kids going after a monster. People are trying to survive.”
Did that also make you feel weird? Everything is going to hell and somebody’s like, best day of your life, here you go.
I was in Gainesville. You know college towns — any time there’s any chance for protests, people are marching. I felt like, “This is it. If you’ve ever wondered what you would’ve done in the civil rights movement, this is your moment.” And I remember wanting to go out and do something, but I also don’t wanna get sick because I live alone and I don’t want my mom or dad to have to come to Florida, you know?
I called my dad. I was like, “I feel really bad about this. I wanna go to a march.” My dad said, “Your power is in your pen.” And, wow, that brought me this calm. I’m not an extrovert. I’m not someone who’s out with a microphone or a megaphone yelling. It’s not because I don’t care. But my power, the way that I protest is in what I write. The way that Black boys are not allowed to have mental illness and talk about it, the way that Black girls and Black men and Black women and Black people are expected to only occupy certain spaces — me writing was my protest to that. And the fact that Black people aren’t allowed to be in fantasy, or historically have not been allowed, and we can’t tell fantastical stories outside of medieval England? That was a protest.
On your “Good Morning America” interview, they mention “Beasts of Prey” has drawn comparisons to “Black Panther.” “Black Panther” was a big deal for kids who had not seen a place like Wakanda on screen before. I wonder if you’re also connecting with an audience that had not found a book like this before.
That’s another reason I wrote it. So Black kids could see themselves, not as disposable sidekicks or as the comedic relief. This story’s about someone who looks like you and very unapologetically. We see Blackness often filtered through a white gaze or a more palatable kind of Blackness. So you see lighter skin. You see Black, but with some sort of Eurocentric feature that makes you beautiful.
Hair is one of those sub-languages. When I talk about the hairstyles in “Beasts of Prey,” I’ve had girls be like, “I wear my hair like that. I know what Fulani braids are. I know what Senegalese twists are.” There’s a moment where one of the characters is kind of lamenting a wash day is coming up, and the almost ritual within the Black community of hair. It takes all day long to wash your hair because it’s curly and it’s thick and it’s a process. And I’ve had a lot of kids be like, “I liked that part because that’s how I feel about wash day for my hair.”
@ayanagray Black people deserve to have stories where they have magical adventures that don’t just center racism. If that’s your jam, please buy my books! #booktok #blackbooktok #blackbookrecs #blackbooks #yafantasybooks #yafantasyseries #ayanagray
Little Rock is a small town, as Arkansas is a small state. Do you get recognized?
I’ve had it happen twice.
That’s the perfect number. You know it wasn’t an accident the first time, and yet you can still live your life in peace.
I feature my dog pretty prominently in my social media. I was walking her and somebody messaged me on Instagram, like, “I saw you walking your dog this morning.” And I was at WordsWorth bookstore. Someone came in and said, “I’m here about that book that I keep hearing about.” And I was like, “Hello.” She was like, “Oh, you’re actually here!” Like, hi, I do live here.
There’s a lingua franca within the state. Which is fun.
Before “Beasts of Prey” came out some Arkansas media were reaching out. And I think at first my publisher was like, oh, that’s cute, this local thing. And I was like, “You don’t understand. When Arkansas finds out that one of their own did something, it’s a big deal.” It’s the Arkansas effect. Then the mayor wrote me a letter and my agent was like, “Oh, you weren’t kidding.” The love I have felt would not have happened if I was in Atlanta.
We keep our standards really, really reasonable. That’s a key to happiness in so many ways.
I’m really grateful for Arkansas. Like our track program’s like one of the best in the country, our architecture school is one of the best in the country. We have so many things. Somebody asked me, “Are there million-dollar houses in Arkansas?”
Have you ever heard of the Waltons?
I just deadpanned. “Not at all. There’s no money in Arkansas. Don’t come.”
A million dollars, that’s like a triple-wide. You could get running water with that.
It’s wild. But there’s so much to be proud of Arkansas for, and it’s really cool that I get to add my little book to cool things that come out of our state.
Maybe you’ll have your name stenciled into the side of the Little Rock public library one day.
A girl can dream.