LL McKinney Books in Order

If you want her signature fantasy series: A Blade So Black → A Dream So Dark → A Crown So Cursed
If you want a superhero coming-of-age story: Nubia: Real One
If you want a dark gothic retelling: Escaping Mr. Rochester
If you want more family-curse fantasy: Splintered Magic

L.L. McKinney grew up in Kansas City, Kansas, reading fantasy, comics, and science fiction, and making up stories long before writing looked like a job. Before she had the words, she has said, she drew pictures. Later came fanfiction, original stories, and a steady diet of anime and shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which helps explain why her fiction moves with both fandom joy and fight-scene energy.

Writing was there early.

It did not stay easy. McKinney has said she stopped writing in high school after a teacher made a cutting comment about her work. She came back to it later, in college, and this time with a different kind of stubbornness. She has also shared that the Twilight phenomenon gave her a push, not because she loved it, but because it convinced her she should stop waiting for permission and try to publish her own stories.

The road from that moment to a published book was long. She has said it took about ten years and more than 250 rejections before she broke through, while she worked day jobs, including writing greeting cards at Hallmark. That stretch matters because it sits underneath the way she talks about the business now. There is no fairy tale version of success here, just a lot of work, a lot of no's, and the decision to keep going anyway.

Her first novel, A Blade So Black, arrived in 2018 and introduced many readers to her version of fantasy. It takes the bones of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and drops them into Atlanta, where Alice Kingston battles nightmare creatures while dealing with grief, school, friendship, and curfew. McKinney followed it with A Dream So Dark and A Crown So Cursed, turning the Nightmare-Verse into a full trilogy. Readers who click with those books usually like the mix of monster hunting, pop-culture wit, romance, and a heroine who feels powerful without ever feeling unreal.

She likes her fantasy loud, weird, and grounded in real feeling.

McKinney has also moved easily between prose, comics, and anthologies. Nubia: Real One brings a DC heroine into a coming-of-age story about power, identity, and being told who you are supposed to be. Splintered Magic leans into family-curse fantasy, while Escaping Mr. Rochester reworks Jane Eyre into a darker queer Gothic. You can also find her in collections such as A Phoenix First Must Burn and The Black Girl Survives This One. Taken together, those books show a writer who likes fantasy, horror, and retellings, but also likes giving Black girls room to be messy, brave, and center stage.

Outside the novels, McKinney is also a poet, an active part of the kidlit world, and a very public advocate for change in publishing. She created the hashtags #PublishingPaidMe and #WhatWoCWritersHear, helped found Juneteenth Book Fest, and has spoken plainly about racism and pay inequity in the industry. In 2020, she was named one of The Root's 100 Most Influential African-Americans. That side of her work is not separate from the fiction. It grows from the same belief that stories should make more room for more people.

These days she lives in Kansas City and still sounds like a full-on fan as much as a professional writer. She describes herself as a gamer, comics lover, and cat person, and her own playful descriptions of her pets suggest a household with plenty of personality. That combination helps explain the appeal of her books. They move fast and hit hard, but they also feel written by someone who genuinely loves genre and wants more readers to see themselves inside it.