ABC Signature has acquired the rights to Cole Brown’s book Greyboy: Finding Blackness in a White World to develop for television, according to Deadline.
- Grown-ish star Yara Shahidi, along with her mother and business partner Keri Shahidi, will develop the the series and executive produce through their 7th Sun Productions.
- This comes as part of their overall deal with ABC Signature, part of Disney Television Studios.
- Brown’s Greyboy: Finding Blackness in a White World, published in 2020, is a “first-hand examination of what it means to navigate the in-between.”
- Deadline shared the book’s synopsis:
- “Cole has heard it all before—token, bougie, oreo—the things we call the kids like him. Black kids who grow up in white spaces, living at an intersection of race and class that many doubt exists. He needed to get far away from the preppy site of his upbringing before he could make sense of it all.”
- “Through a series of personal anecdotes and interviews with his peers, Cole transports us to his adolescence and explores what it’s like to be young and in search of identity. He digs into the places where, in youth, a greyboy’s difference is most acutely felt: parenting, police brutality, depression, and dating, to name a few.”
- The book was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work by a Debut Author.
What they’re saying:
- Yara and Keri Shahidi: “Every time we picked up Greyboy, Cole’s words have only become more resonant. His essays beautifully, and at times, painfully illuminate the much larger conversations around being ‘tokenized’ while navigating ever-changing white spaces. We are excited to partner with Cole and share the brilliance of Greyboy with a larger audience.”
- Author Cole Brown: “From our first conversation, it was obvious that Yara, Keri, and the 7th Sun team understood this story intimately and had a vision for it that aligned with my own. I’m thrilled to be working with them to bring Greyboy to life for TV.”