The British artist and activist paints action with words in his debut, Blue, a potent exploration of queer identity and coming of age amidst global upheaval.
Elijah Mckenzie-Jackson is a Renaissance man with his heart on his sleeve and his eyes fixed on humanity’s collective future. The artist and activist has made global waves since the age of fifteen, co-founding the queer-run climate action nonprofit WaicUp, serving as a United Nations Togetherband Ambassador, and playing a vital role in the Fridays for Future movement. Alongside husband Jerome Foster II, the youngest White House advisor in U.S. history, Mckenzie-Jackson is a living example that you are never too young to make meaningful change in the world. The British twenty-one-year-old has taken up the mantle of writer with his book, Blue, an extended essay that powerfully blends his personal experiences and insights with a larger, communal exploration of art, mental health, climate justice, and LGBTQ+ rights.
Mission: Your forthcoming debut is a blended memoir, manifesto, and creative guidebook. How did you approach this cross-genre structure?
Elijah Mckenzie-Jackson: Blue not only reflects my own nonlinear way of thinking but also responds to the ways Gen Z engages with information, identity, and meaning-making. We are drawn to hybrid forms that acknowledge the complexity of lived experience while also offering theoretical or political insight. The genre needed to resist fragmentation and mirror the simultaneity of modern life.
The personal is an entry point into broader cultural, political, and ecological frameworks. I was less concerned with conclusions than with mapping the movement between memory, research, theory, and reflection. Empathy and education are not mutually exclusive; they are often most powerful when held in tension with each other. Situating scholarship alongside deeply personal moments disrupts the artificial boundary between intellect and feeling.
M: I imagine writing the book was a largely cathartic experience, an excavation of the soul. What are some of the emotions and thoughts that came up?
EMJ: One of the earliest threads I followed was my childhood, being raised by two moms. Diversity felt instinctively good and natural, not something to be explained, justified, or performed. “Normal” is a narrative people tell when they are uncomfortable with complexity. I built a baseline of openness, curiosity over judgment, and creativity over conformity. It helped me see beyond categories: climate and queerness, politics and identity, personal and collective.
School brought complications. “Gay” was a slur in the hallways. I felt anxious, but I internalized it. That’s the danger of subtle harm, microaggressions: it can teach you to adapt instead of resist. Even now, I catch myself folding inwards without meaning to, making myself smaller before I speak.
At 15, I entered activism. That year was drenched in grief—once you start seeing the cracks in the world, you can’t unsee them. I now know that if that grief marked a loss, it also made space for something else: a clearer voice, a sharper eye, and a refusal to follow the herd. Writing Blue helped me rediscover that part of myself—not just the activist or the artist, but the child who always sensed that there was another way to live.
M: You carved a niche by fusing pop culture and activism. Did you notice a larger, more accessible narrative emerging? What does artivism mean to you?
EMJ: The fusion reflects my experience being politicized through the lens of Western mass media, the internet, and visual culture. Gen Z engages the world through a collage of aesthetics, references, and emotion. Pop culture is not peripheral to our politics but one of its most powerful terrains.
These intersections allow us to reach people who might never pick up a traditional political text, but who are already fluent in the semiotics of culture. There’s a power in making difficult conversations legible through familiar imagery, rhythm, or tone. It’s not about diluting the message, but decoding it into forms people already know how to feel.
Artivism reimagines how change is communicated. It utilizes symbolism, metaphor, and visual storytelling to translate systemic issues into a felt experience. Art allows people to feel something from it before they even know what it’s trying to say. It enables us to access emotions beyond the limits of familiar language. What if the most radical thing we could do is make people feel again? Pop culture provides the language; activism provides the purpose. Artivism is the bridge.
M: What is your greatest hope for other young, queer, globally-minded people to take from reading your book? How has writing it further galvanized you?
EMJ: I hope Blue offers readers permission to feel deeply, to interrogate inherited norms, and to hold contradictions without apology. The dominant narrative demands we temper our grief, moderate our joy, and suppress the urgency we feel. Blue resists that. Complexity is not a weakness, but a form of intelligence.
It reaffirmed my belief that storytelling is a powerful tool, one capable of disrupting narratives, mobilizing empathy, and advancing change in ways that raw data or rhetoric often cannot. The writing process deepened my commitment to cultivating a world where vulnerability and strength coexist, and where our stories shape, stretch, and ultimately transform the systems we seek to reimagine.
Homepage image by Ariel Levi. Above image courtesy of the artist.
