Jayden Makayabo

Jayden Makayabo is a first-generation Congolese-American writer and nursing student from Texas, where he balances a full clinical course load with two serving jobs and an early-morning gym habit he refuses to negotiate on.

Raised between cultures and between worlds, he writes adult literary fantasy about family, faith, and the price of protection, stories where the most dangerous weapon in the room is a well-read statute and the highest stakes are always at the dinner table.

Cost of Reverie is his debut novel, a standalone emotional arc and the first book of a planned trilogy, born out of a question he has carried for most of his life: How long can you sacrifice yourself for others, before you become unrecognizable? He wrote its central family, the Makayabos, as a Black family bound by ritual and stubborn tenderness because he grew up loving fantasy shelves that rarely made room for families like his own.