Yaa Gyasi
Author of Homegoing and Transcendent Kingdom, and recipient of the National Book Foundation's 'Under 35' award
Leila Mottley
Award-winning author of Oprah’s Book Club selection Nightcrawling and former Youth Poet Laureate of Oakland
Meet the Teen Poet Whose Love Letter is a Call to Action
Photo Credit: Magdalena Frigo
Leila Mottley is the author of the critically-acclaimed novel Nightcrawling, an Oprah's Book Club pick and New York Times bestseller that navigates themes of girlhood, womanhood, and social justice with piercing detail and rhythmic brilliance. In her latest novel, The Girls Who Grew Big (June 2025), Mottley investigates the cultural scrutiny of teen mothers. Her brave and distinctive voice makes her an inspiring keynote speaker who addresses the image and interiority of teenage Black girls, agency, and the shadows of a country built on silence.
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About Leila Mottley
A native of Oakland, California, Leila Mottley is an author and poet who uses storytelling as a method of disruption and resistance. Wise beyond her years, Mottley tackles uncomfortable subjects in her acclaimed poetry, her incandescent debut novel Nightcrawling, and her upcoming novel The Girls Who Grew Big—spotlighting issues of police violence in her hometown and highlighting the necessity of reproductive justice and resources for young mothers.
Leila Mottley’s debut, Nightcrawling, is an unforgettable novel inspired by true stories of the exploitation of young women by police departments in the US, including a 2015-16 case in Oakland and its subsequent cover-up. In her dazzling page-turner, Mottley brings alive her home city, where Black kids strive to locate hope and joy – against all odds – in a world complicated by police brutality, sexual violence, and families fractured by the criminal justice system. Nightcrawling was selected by Oprah Winfrey for her 2022 Book Club, making Mottley the youngest author ever selected for the club. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize Award and PEN America 2023 Hemingway Award for Debut Novel.
At sixteen, Mottley became the Oakland Youth Poet Laureate and she has gone on to publish a poetry collection, woke up no light. Moving in sections from “girlhood” to “neighborhood” to “falsehood” to, finally, “womanhood,” these poems reckon with themes of reparations, restitution, and desire. The collection is sharp and raw, wise and rhythmic, a combination that lights up each page. From unearthing histories to searching for ways to dream of a future in a world constantly on the brink of disaster, Mottley sets forth personal and political revelation with piercing detail.
Mottley’s sophomore novel, The Girls Who Grew Big, follows three teen mothers in Panhandle Florida who are making lives for themselves and their children despite the mass judgment and shame projected onto them. Mottley writes of the ferocity and resilience it takes for these girls–and all mothers–to make their own decisions about their pregnancies and parenting in a culture that villainizes mothers for any and every choice. Leila Mottley’s writing has also been published in Oprah Daily, Conde Nast Traveler, and The New York Times, and she has been featured on NPR, CBS Mornings, Late Night with Seth Meyers, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, and more.
Contact us for more information about booking Leila Mottley for your next event.
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Speaking Topics
Black Women and Police Sexual Violence
In this unapologetically honest talk, Leila Mottley speaks on the abuses women of color and marginalized groups—especially sex workers and trans women—face from law enforcement. Drawing on her powerful debut novel Nightcrawling, the case that inspired it, and her own experiences, Mottley advocates for the end of police violence against Black women, girls, trans women, and gender-nonconforming people, and for the need to create alternative structures of safety that protect our most vulnerable community members.
Reproductive Justice in Our Collective Imagination
Drawing on her sophomore novel The Girls Who Grew Big, the history of abortion in America, and her work as a doula, in this lecture Mottley urges us to define what reproductive justice looks like in practical terms and the subconscious teachings about motherhood, choice, and desire we are given through the art readily available to us. With no formalized or mandated childbirth education in the U.S., many of us receive our information about pregnancy and childbirth from books and media. Mottley discusses abortion scenes in classic TV and movies, the representation of pregnancy in books like The Handmaid's Tale and The Bluest Eye, and the births in her own novel to dissect the myths and mysteries around reproduction and what it takes to imagine alternative stories around pregnancy and birth.
How to Make Young People Want to Read
In a time when kids are rarely reading for pleasure, we have to understand the reasons children aren't reading and how we can possibly begin to change that. In this invigorating talk, Mottley reminds us that children resist us when we assert force and explains how we can shift our motivations and our tactics and learn to think like kids again. As a writer who centers young people in her work, a member of Gen Z, and a former preschool teacher, Mottley is uniquely positioned to discuss literacy for youth in America and help us all learn how to lead the young people in our lives back to the world of books.
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Praise for Leila Mottley
Leila was very warm and kind. She engaged with students and showed interest in their questions. She was great all day. She had a nice vibe.
— Center for Literary ArtsWonderful! Leila Mottley was so poised, clear, and moving.
— City College of San Francisco, Women’s and Gender Studies DepartmentGreat. Amazing stories and experiences shared. Super engaging and concise.
— GoogleLeila was phenomenal!! People really appreciated her keynote, hearing her perspective, and interacting with her through Q&A and the book signing. Thank you for all your support and coordination, and thank you to Leila for who she is and for sharing her wisdom and time with us. It was a pleasure working with you all – you and your team made the process smooth, including connecting us with Marcus Book Stores (they were great to work with too). Having Leila at our conference was an absolute honor. We are still beaming from the experience, as were our attendees. She is an exceptional young woman.
— Alliance for GirlsPraise for The Girls Who Grew Big
This broken world is lucky to have Leila Mottley writing in it. Like Jesmyn Ward, Kiese Laymon and Toni Cade Bambara before her, Mottley digs deep into the parts of America that many tell us to forget. In gorgeous prose, she brings to life the beauty and brutality of the Florida panhandle, and turns narratives about motherhood, girlhood and the South on their heads. Mottley is the real deal—a vital voice in the American literary tapestry, giving us a full, empathetic understanding of the parts of life the rest of culture tells us to ignore.
— Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of LibertieThe Girls Who Grew Big is a novel about teen pregnancy that brilliantly upends every reductive trope and platitude on the subject. With impeccable and breathtaking prose, Mottley takes us into the treacherous terrain where girlhood and womanhood collide, and where families and friendships fracture, and the lines between them blur. Simone, Adela, Emory and The Girls live out loud and are flawed, tender, and absolutely unforgettable. Mottley continues to show us the power and beauty of her pen!
— Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church LadiesRaw, wild, and achingly beautiful, The Girls Who Grew Big is one of the most spiritually accurate and electric portrayals of motherhood I’ve ever read. Leila Mottley is the real deal.
— Rufi Thorpe, author of Margo’s Got Money TroublesPraise for woke up no light
Leila Mottley writes with the introspection of Zora Neale Hurston, the righteous rage of Bobby Seales, and a lyrical wit mirroring Souls of Mischief. Each section of woke up no light is a testimony to living and thriving; and proof that one of Oakland’s mightiest heirlooms has nothing to lose. Mottley aims to free the girlchild from the bindings and blindings as she pens with such eloquent sharpness: ‘California says they might owe us a cent or two / if we can prove the cells that make us.’
woke no light is a revolution of words and worlds, readying to become. Poems centering the effect of street scriptures, gender roles, police brutality, and the humanity lost to celebritism; Mottley leaves no rock unturned and aims to set us all free.— Mahogany L. Browne, author of Chrome Valley and Vinyl Moon and poet-in-residence, Lincoln CenterPraise for Nightcrawling
Leila Mottley has a poet’s delicate touch when she tells us the most brutal, heart-crushing truths. This is an electrifying debut.
— Dave EggersThere is a compelling argument to make that Nightcrawling is the most compelling book written by an American teenager in my lifetime. Somehow, even that feels too brittle for the way Leila Mottley pulls us through a body, a city and a nation equally consumed with crawling toward liberation and jogging toward inequitable failure. Nightcrawling is a scorching, incredibly readable book that takes seriously the task of readerly provocation on every page. Get ready. Or don’t. It doesn’t matter. Leila Mottley is here.
— Kiese LaymonLeila Mottley’s commanding debut, inspired by the life events of one woman’s struggle for body and soul against crushing exploitation, is fierce and devastating, rendered with electrifying urgency by this colossal young talent.
— Ayana MathisWith its powerful poetry and courageous, unsparing vision, Nightcrawling is more than just a magnificent debut novel. It is a bid, by this prodigiously gifted young writer, to heal a broken world.
— Ruth OzekiLeila Mottley has an extraordinary gift. She writes with the humility and sparkle of a child, but with the skill and deft touch of a wizened, seasoned storyteller.
— James McBrideThe writing in Leila Mottley’s Nightcrawling erupts and flows like lava, makes hot bright an Oakland that runs the city’s uncontrollable brilliance, its destructive and generative veins the same, Mottley’s energetic writing here too, bursts at the seams of every page, pushing you deeper into a story you can’t help but continue swallowing, stay thirsty for, while it swallows you whole.
— Tommy Orange -
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Featured Title
The Girls Who Grew Big
“Mottley is a dazzling writer and this novel opens up the world of young mothers in all its makeshift, sticky, struggling glory. The Girls Who Grew Big is sensuous, gripping, and utterly believable.” —Emma Donoghue, author of Room
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