Chain-Gang All-Stars
Chain-Gang All-Stars
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Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah on Chain-Gang All-Stars
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A waiver, a father, a generationThe book’s premise arrived in a single sentence during a car ride with his sister around 2017. They were talking about reality television and the outer limits of what a person could consent to, and the question that surfaced answered itself before he could think it through.
I remember a question just popping into my head, like, ‘What’s the worst thing you could sign a waiver for?’ And immediately my mind went to: ‘To fight for your freedom if you’re incarcerated.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, that’s it.’ [paraphrased from audio]
Long before that car ride, his father, a criminal defense attorney, had given him the question the novel would eventually spend 400 pages working through. What Adjei-Brenyah heard as a child wasn’t an answer but a refusal of easy answers, and it lodged.
When I was really young, I remember hearing for the first time that my father was defending someone who had killed someone. And I remember thinking kind of, like, huh, well, I guess my dad’s a villain, you know? I guess my dad’s a bad guy. And I think I expressed some kind of, like, confusion. And I remember him telling me it’s not that simple.
That reply, and the decades of reckoning it set in motion, became the moral architecture the book was built on.
His attention arrived at the prison system through the specific grief of his generation. The killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012 was the entry point, and the research the novel required turned a political sympathy into something harder and less comfortable.
I was the generation that got activated by Trayvon Martin. And it’s kind of hard to think of him outside the context of the larger carceral state. Then once you start thinking about policing, you get to the actual prisons. Working on [Chain-Gang] radicalized me further, because I got informed, and as you get more informed, it gets really hard to feel like it’s ethical to have a system like that in a place that’s supposed to be in any way humanistic.
He did not arrive at the novel already holding the convictions it argues for. The research and the writing moved him, and he was precise about the order in which that happened when he accepted the Inside Literary Prize in 2025, the first major US literary award judged entirely by incarcerated people.
I wrote Chain-Gang All-Stars sort of hoping I believed in its aspirations. In doing the research it required, in engaging with the work and learning from those who have lived inside I grew into a vehement belief in abolition and its principals.
How he wrote it
Footnotes, speculative distance, and the fictive dreamAdjei-Brenyah set the novel in a speculative program called CAPE, in which incarcerated people fight to the death for the chance at freedom, rather than at a real named prison. The distance was a craft decision with a built-in argument: if an invented equivalent reads as monstrous, the reader has to reckon with what that says about the historical original.
I like speculative fiction because I could be very specific and it’s also difficult to reduce. [paraphrased from audio]
His research was scene-driven rather than systematic. Each time he arrived at a situation he hadn’t lived, he found the details and let them surface in the prose. What he found about prison conditions consistently outpaced what he’d imagined, including the formal language around crowd-control weapons, where the gap between official name and physical reality carried its own meaning.
What I was struck by was how they were just people who were feeling greatly in a terrible system, in a really particular kind of hell.
That observation, drawn from working directly with formerly incarcerated members of the Rockland Coalition to End the New Jim Crow, shaped how he rendered his fighters: not symbols, but people with interior lives that the system was designed to deny.
Footnotes presented him with a specific problem he’d spent years avoiding. His core commitment as a fiction writer was to protect the reader’s immersion, and the physical mechanics of a footnote, the way it forces the eye down the page, tear that immersion open. He broke his own rule deliberately, and the disruption became a feature rather than a flaw.
For a long time, my core idea as a writer was to never break the fictive dream... Footnotes really announce the work as a text because of the mechanical way you have to move your eyes down.
Some footnotes give in-world context; others supply real statistics. The alternation keeps the reader uncertain about which kind is coming, which is itself a version of the book’s argument about the line between spectacle and reality.
He wrote the book at a pace of two hours or a thousand words a day for several years, a discipline that felt almost absurd in retrospect when he measured it against the finished length. The daily rhythm also shaped how he thought about the love story at the novel’s center, which required time he could not have given it in a short story.
Chain-Gang All-Stars is me having no hang ups... I know what I can do. I know it’s valid. I know I’m making art... I’m more affirmed in my purpose, which is connected to potentially creating a palatable way for people to engage with radical ideas.
On what’s at stake
The carceral state as the system of all systemsAdjei-Brenyah’s earlier collection, Friday Black (2018), trained its eye on consumer capitalism and the small daily bargains people make inside it. Chain-Gang All-Stars moves to a larger frame. He named the carceral state specifically, and the scale of the comparison he reached for was deliberate.
I’m interested in the different systems that trick us into stepping on each other’s heads... And I think that the carceral state, in America in particular, is the Death Star of that enterprise, so to speak.
He was equally specific about what the book is not arguing. The alternative he wants readers to imagine is not simply severity dialed down. It requires building things that don’t exist yet, and he framed abolition in additive terms rather than subtractive ones.
Abolition isn’t just about removing things. It’s actually about adding institutions, it’s about adding, you know, compassion. [paraphrased from audio]
Dr. Patricia St. Jean, the scientist in the novel whose pain-relief technology is seized and repurposed as a torture device, was written during the years Adjei-Brenyah’s father was dying of cancer and in chronic pain from chemotherapy neuropathy. The character carries an argument about where every unchecked system eventually arrives.
Patty’s journey is, to me, the story we see unfolding again and again in our society, that technological advancement without more ethical growth will inevitably lead to terrible things.
What he wants us to sit with
Complicity, imagination, and the standard of compassionThe violence in the novel is written to be absorbing, and Adjei-Brenyah designed it that way. A reader who finds the fights compelling has walked into the book’s trap, and the trap has a specific mechanism: it converts the reader’s own moral instinct into evidence against them.
That’s sort of like an ego response, thinking ‘We are better than this.’ And then once that bubble of, I don’t know, innate humane pride pops up, I can sort of grab it and hitch it to reality, which is to say – yeah, we are better than this. So your instinct about that is correct. But despite how you feel, this horror that you think is so impossible, it actually exists right now and has done in many different iterations for decades.
He also wants the act of following a speculative world to count as a form of practice. Tracking the invented logic of CAPE, the novel’s gladiatorial prison program, requires the reader to extend their imagination in a direction that has political consequences beyond the book.
One of the benefits of working with speculative fiction is that if you can understand my book at all, it means you are exercising a certain type of imagination that I think is important to have the ability and capacity to imagine a better world at all.
He wrote Chain-Gang All-Stars from a more settled creative identity than he’d had when he wrote Friday Black. The confidence was not personal comfort but clarity about what fiction is for, and what he wanted this particular book to accomplish in the reader.
I think part of my purpose as a writer is to help make compassion the standard. [paraphrased from audio]