Leila Mottley, who was also the 2018 Oakland youth poet laureate, grew up in an Oakland that bore witness to the turbulence of greed, racism and bureaucratic corruption every day. At the same time, it was a rich bed of soil for her poetry and spoken word, surrounded by artists, hustlers and thought leaders. In “Nightcrawling,” she conjures a world within 17-year-old East Oakland native Kiara Johnson to lay those feelings out. The book has since become a New York Times bestseller, an Oprah’s Book Club pick and part of the 2022 Booker Prize Longlist.
