Brittney Morris Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Anthologies

Brittney Morris
Author Brittney Morris is the founder and the former president of the Boston University Creative Writing Club. Her work has appeared in The Boston University Chimaerid Literary Magazine. She has a BA in economics.

Brittney spends her spare time slaying at DDR, playing video games, and enjoying the Seattle rain from her apartment. She lives with Steven, her husband, who would much rather enjoy the rainfall from a campsite somewhere in the woods because he has not played enough horror games.

One food she will never try again is okra. She does not like the smell, the taste, or its texture. It is at the top of a very short list of foods that she does not like.

When she was growing up, she could only be herself without apologies when she was with her family as well as other Black people. When at church and at school, she had to code-switch or use her “telephone voice” and always be mindful of the feelings of white people. This felt to her like stepping into and out of an alternate reality.

As a kid, she was an avid gamer, but a reluctant reader. She feels that video games have been an underutilized educational tool now for quite some time. She believes even games such as “Minecraft” and “Fortnite” have educational aspects to them. More of the indie games make it feel like you are playing a novel: an interactive, colorful, and immersive novel.

She hopes “Slay” feels like reading a video game. One that is empathy-inducing, educational, and exploratory.

She wanted to write “Slay” because of her experience watching “Black Panther” when it opened. She wished somebody would make a Wakanda Simulator game. Since she had never programmed a game before, she felt a novel about one would be second best.

As she got the idea for “SLAY”, her heart was pounding and her hands were clammy. She couldn’t wait to get to her computer and start writing it immediately. She did not want to eat or sleep nearly as much as she wanted to get the story out. Brittney had never had such an intense response to an idea for a book before.

Walking into the theater, that was filled with black people, when she saw the movie was unconditional and total acceptance. It didn’t matter the music she heard, how she spoke, or how she was dressed or whatever else she had inflicted on herself to fell black enough. The moment she left Wakanda, she realized she needed to return. So she came up with the idea that gets to go to a version of Wakanda whenever she wanted to and it was here the novel was born.

In the novel, she jumps around to show different Black characters, and show what SLAY means to different black people all around the world. She showed how broad the spectrum of Black womanhood is by having a chapter from Jaylen’s perspective, a trans black woman, and another from Cicada’s point of view, a girl that has a black dad and a white mother.

Brittney also included Professor Abbott’s point of view in the novel because he is not a gamer, and it might be her favorite as it reminds her a lot of her parents, who also are not gamers. She figured including this character would get non-gamers interested and they would want to read it too.

The novel also shows the differences and similarities in how Kiera’s parents view blackness with how Kiera and her sister do. This comes from how Brittney and her parents view it. It comes from the differences in the times the her and her parents come from. Things that just weren’t said when her parents weren’t kids are said all the time these days. Things that should not be said now, were commonplace back in those times. Natural hair was thought to be unprofessional when her parents were growing up. These are things that are worth exploring in a novel.

While writing the novel, Malcolm (Kiera’s boyfriend) winds up becoming a voice inside of Kiera’s own head and has a radical view of Blackness. It is one that she must reconcile with her own perspective.

Her debut novel, called “Slay” was released in the year 2019 and is from the young adult fiction genre. It is an Indies Introduce Summer/Fall 2019 young adult selection and a Fall 2019 Kids’ Indie Next List pick.

“Slay” is the first stand alone novel, which was released in the year 2019. During the day, Kiera Johnson (age seventeen) is a math tutor, an honors student, and one of the few Black students of Jefferson Academy. While at home, she joins the hundreds of thousands of Black gamers that duel around the globe as Nubian personas in the super secret multi player online role-playing card game called SLAY. Nobody knows that Kiera is the developer of the game, not her buddies, or her family, not even her boyfriend, Malcolm. Malcolm believes that video games are, in part, responsible for the Black man’s downfall.

When a teen in Kansas City is killed over a dispute in the SLAY world, news of the game hits the mainstream media, and SLAY gets labeled an exclusionist, racist, and a violent hub for criminals and thugs. Worse, an anonymous troll gets into the game, threatening to file a lawsuit against Kiera for her ‘anti-white discrimination’.

Driven to save the one world that she can be herself in, Kiera has to preserve her secret identity. As well as harness what it really means to be unapologetically Black in a world in a world that is intimidated by Blackness. Will she be able to protect her game without losing herself?

Readers were captivated from page one and fell for Kiera as well as what she stands for. The book is a dynamite debut that follows a ferocious teen game developer. Brittney delivers a tightly written novel that offers an eye-opening take for many readers. The book is unafraid about pulling punches when it counts. It is an impressively insightful and wildly entertaining read.