| Language: | English |
| Genre: | Young adult |
| Years Active: | 2020–present |
| Occupation: | Novelist |
| Nationality: | American |
| Awards: | John Steptoe/Coretta Scott King Award 2023 |
Jas Hammonds is an American writer of young adult fiction, best known for her Coretta Scott King Award-winning[1] debut We Deserve Monuments.
Hammonds says she enjoys writing about themes of mental health, queerness, exploration of mixed-raced identities and Blackness, complicated family and friendship dynamics, and bittersweet endings, which always an appearance in her works.[2]
The first book she remembers reading is There’s a Wocket in My Pocket by Dr. Seuss and the book that made her want to be a writer is Alice in Rapture, Sort of by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor.[3]
Hammonds identifies as a Black, queer writer[4] and has lived in the Pacific Northwest.
Before becoming an author, she was a flight attendant.[5]
Hammonds is a recipient of the 2020 James Baldwin fellowship at MacDowell.[6] She has also been awarded multiple fellowships by Highlights Foundation, Lambda Literary Review, and Baldwin for the Arts.
We Deserve Monuments is set in a fictional town in Georgia and tells the story of a Black biracial girl moving there to aid her aging, sick grandmother. The story explores the themes of love, family, generational trauma, and racism. She wrote the first draft in 2016 and originally envisioned it as a ghost story. It was published by Roaring Brook, an imprint of Macmillan, in Summer 2022.[7]
It was critically well-received, becoming a Summer/Fall 2022 Indies Introduce YA selection,[8] and a Best Book of 2022 as chosen by Kirkus Reviews[9] and School Library Journal,[10] as well as garnering starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews,[11] Booklist,[12] School Library Journal,[13] BookPage,[14] and Shelf Awareness.[15]
We Deserve Monuments also was a 2023 Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award for New Talent Winner.
Her second novel, Thirsty, is about a mixed-race lesbian girl that joins an exclusive sorority in her first year of college that promises to help her build valuable connections to powerful women of color, and uses alcohol to cope with the financial pressure, her anxiety, and her lack of social status. It is scheduled for publication in May 2024. Hammonds says her aim was to explore the themes of the connection between alcohol and societal pressure in a college setting.