Reaction videos have started flooding TikTok this summer, all with the same question: who is Quan Millz?
The answer varied depending on the person, but each new reaction brought with it some variation of curiosity, shock and excitement. “If you like watching shows like Paternity court,” one TikTok user commented, “or old fashioned Maury Povich, if you’re old enough to remember Jenny Jones and Ricki Lake, you too might enjoy this reading experience.” Read another caption: “Quan Millz is so unhinged we must protect him at all costs.”
There didn’t seem to be a corner of the internet that Millz hadn’t reached. On the podcast Sleeping in mom’s bed, rapper Danny Brown recited some of his favorite books to Christina B. “I want to collect every book this motherfucker got,” he said, laughing, as they scrolled through Millz’s dazzling, sometimes X-rated book titles. There was Pregnant by my husband’s grandfather And Tax season Thot. Also, How Yo Coochie Stank: A Love Story About Bacterial Vaginosis. And who could forget, Let me smell your cock. “All black men have been through these things,” Brown joked. ‘I don’t really feel like reading them. I’m going to collect them like Pokémon cards.”
Brown’s point is this: very little is known about Millz other than the fact of his prolific output. He is an author who has self-published dozens of books but has avoided real mainstream attention until recently. The majority of Millz’s books are available for less than $1 on Amazon, and fall squarely within the subgenre of streetlights, a category of American literature known for its controversial and confrontational realism of black life in the “inner city.” .
The buzz around Millz’s work started in July, when a TikTok user going by the name @justdesean posted a video to his page. He wondered if his 223,000 followers knew who Millz was. At the time, most people outside the highly insular worlds of street lighting, urban fiction, and black romance hadn’t. “I want to know what book you’re likely to pick up and read,” he said. “Are you prepared?” What followed became weeks of discussion on group chats and comment sections. The books he highlights are some of Millz’s most polarizing titles, such as Becky puts raisins in the potato salad, to which @justdesean exclaimed: “Look at the potato salad! No way!” When he was ready Old Thot next door— if social media is any indication, Millz’s most famous title — he wondered, “Whose grandma is that?” The video exploded on TikTok, hitting Twitter and Instagram feeds seemingly overnight, and has since been viewed more than 2.1 million times.
As the online chatter intensified, the mystery of Millz’s identity remained. Who was he?
Raised in Miami, Millz started writing in 2014 on the advice of a friend, his former business partner and co-author N’Dia Rae. (Rae is also a fairly prolific author in the genre whose From ashes to ashes, from dust to chicks trilogy, a story about sisterhood and the loss of trust, was described on Goodreads as “a page-turning jackpot.”) He had not yet graduated from college and was working various jobs. Rae convinced him that this was an easy way to earn passive income. Millz initially dabbled in novel writing, writing under a different pseudonym, but found a more energetic readership in Street Lights. In 2017, he officially went solo and carved out a unique niche in a genre already overflowing with stories of deep-rooted originality.