You could say it was written in the stars for flight attendant–turned–author Jas Hammonds to write books. From writing fan fiction on message boards with her friends to frequenting bookstores with their mother, Hammond’s formative years helped mold them to be the writer they are today. Their YA debut, We Deserve Monuments (Roaring Brook), showcases three generations of women in a Black family with roots in the small town of Burrell, Ga. Hammonds bridges girl-next-door romance with hidden family drama and delivers an explosive tale of queer love, grief, race, and trauma.
The novel portrays an intense mix of dysfunction, multigenerational racism, and queer scarcity. Hammonds draws from their own experiences of being biracial (having a Black mother and white father) and queer to create Avery, the flawed 17-year-old teen protagonist. When Avery’s mother Zora uproots them from Washington, D.C., Avery finds herself developing a romance that becomes the gateway to unlocking her family’s secrets.
“It wasn’t supposed to be a page-turner,” Hammonds says about the mystery element of their book. “Some people have that reaction, but that wasn’t my intention. I just wanted to tell the story about these three women and the love and the grief between them.”
Hammonds knew they wanted to be a writer ever since they were in elementary school. Their journey started with writing fan fiction with their best friend, and with the encouragement of their creative mother who chose books and music as avenues to bond with them. 2016 was a transformative year for Hammonds, as they began drafting what would lead to a series of revisions for We Deserve Monuments, which was six years in the making. What started as something to do during flight layovers turned into a passion project that eventually led them to sign up for writers’ workshops to hone their skills.
Hammonds says, “The hardest part was getting the first draft done, because there’s no one waiting on it—no agent or deadline. So writing something where nobody cared except me, I had to convince myself that it was worth following all the way through to the end.”
They participated in the now defunct Pitch Wars—a mentoring initiative in which agents and editors partnered with up-and-coming authors to help them secure book deals. This social media–driven cause gave marginalized writers like Hammonds the opportunity to have their work critiqued and seen.
“I was coming from aviation, an industry where we all go through the same training,” they say. “It was startling coming into publishing and realizing you’re just supposed to figure it out, and that was incredibly frustrating at times.” Hammonds explains that whisper networks for marginalized writers and platforms like Melanin in YA—a database for readers to support Black YA writers and books—remain critical to their success and the success of other Black writers.
After Pitch Wars, Hammonds signed with Suzie Townsend at New Leaf Literary & Media, who said she liked their pitch and requested a full draft. “We spent about six months editing the book,” Hammonds says, “and then we went out on submission and there was a whole lot of nothing. It was just sitting around and waiting, and then rejections started rolling in.”
Eventually Hammonds received some positive feedback, along with an editorial letter with suggestions that would require a full rewrite. So they rewrote the book in hopes that the editor would like it, only to have the revision rejected. “That was one of the lowest points for me,” Hammonds says. “I was heartbroken.”
They found, during the submission process, that white editors said they “couldn’t connect” with their characters. “If this book was gonna die on submission,” they say, “I told my agent I wanted to submit to every Black YA editor out there.” It was finally bought by Mekisha Telfer at Roaring Brook.
Hammonds is currently working on a contemporary standalone book that is set for release from Roaring Brook in summer 2024. In that book, they say, they are excited about “the opportunity to write about messy girls and explore addiction in an honest, vulnerable way.”
