During the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Malavika Kannan could often be found in Fabulosa Books, masked-up and carefully perusing the shop’s collection of LGBTQ+ literature. She loved the atmosphere of the bookstore, tucked away in San Francisco’s Castro district, and would stare at the shelves, picturing the day when the book she was quietly writing would sit on them.

She had no clue that a few years later, not only would she have finished writing her second novel and young adult debut, but she would be hosting a book release event at Fabulosa Books in celebration.

“All the Yellow Suns,” set for release Tuesday, July 11, follows Maya Krishnan, a queer Indian American teenager, as she explores the realms of activism, community and romance.

“The book is about her process of finding language to articulate how she feels about the world, how she feels about her identity (and) how she feels about love,” Kannan told The Chronicle by phone from New York, where the incoming Stanford University senior is currently participating in a summer research program.“She does not necessarily have the language to describe the sense of rage that she has, and she sometimes feels like she’s alone in that anger. I think that’s a pretty common feeling for young people (especially) young, queer people of color growing up in suburbia.”

Kannan’s debut children’s novel “The Bookweaver’s Daughter,” released in September 2020 by Tanglewood Publishing when she was just 17, is a fierce tale of female friendship grounded in Indian mythology. The aspiring author hadn’t planned to publish the book; she wrote it in secret while attending Seminole High School in Sanford, Fla. It wasn’t until she applied to the Scholastic Arts and Writing contest on a whim and won that she realized she could be a published author.

This time around, Kannan said writing “All the Yellow Suns” was a more community-based process. With one book already published, she had an air of newfound confidence and was no longer secretive about her writing. Instead, she surrounded herself with writers, artists and friends with whom she could brainstorm and get feedback from.

事实上,Kannan,比较文学ajor, loved that process so much that she spent her spring quarter at Stanford this year working on an independent study with creative writing lecturer Nina Schloesser Tarano revising the first draft of her third, forthcoming novel.

“(Malavika) knows how to stay true to herself, even when the stakes feel high, and this is what allows her to be so prolific,” Tarano said. “I have really tried to speak to the power of her vision.”

Inspired by the way Kannan encapsulates the Gen Z experience in her writing, Tarano invited Kannan, 22, to speak at her young adult fiction class last quarter as a guest author. Kannan read an excerpt of “All the Yellow Suns” and students were able to ask her questions about the novel and her writing process.

“I really loved having a queer young person of color’s perspective centered and having this protagonist’s conflicting relationship with her own identity and with whiteness be explicitly looked at in (‘All the Yellow Suns’),” Tarano said.

The novel began to take form when Kannan was a junior in high school. She started to write Maya’s character from her own experience as an Indian American queer girl growing up in Florida. However, by the time she had finished the book, she was almost 20 — no longer a teenager and no longer resonating as strongly with the YA genre on a personal level. In that regard, Kannan views the book as a time capsule.

“It’s really nice to have been able to capture and honor that piece of my past (and) have answers to questions I know now,” Kannan said.

Similar to Maya, Kannan was involved with local activism in high school, volunteering with organizations such as March for Our Lives, in support of gun control legislation, and Women’s March, advocating for gender equality. Growing up in the conservative Florida suburbs, she said she was drawn to the world of civic engagement with a sense of urgency.

Kannan came out as queer the same summer as the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, and had grown accustomed to over-policing at her high school. As the frequency of troubling, violent events increased, she felt pulled toward the world of politics and started college with the intention of pursuing a political science degree. It wasn’t until the pandemic that she realized there were other ways she could take a stand, as she turned to writing and storytelling more seriously, and changed majors.

“Politics are important, but fiction and literature and stories and worldbuilding also have an important role to play in making change and making this world worth living in,” Kannan said. “It kind of feels like when the world is burning down, the last thing people need is a made up world. But I saw during the pandemic how much fiction and stories in general were bringing to peoples lives. … I kind of understood that that’s something that people need to survive.”

In addition to penning two novels, Kannan has had the opportunity to write features and editorials for publications such as the Washington Post and Teen Vogue, and was even an intern at The Chronicle in 2021. She is still figuring out what she wants to do beyond college, but knows one thing for sure: Writing will play a fundamental role.

In what she describes as a full-circle moment, Kannan plans to return to Fabulosa Books in September for a book tour event in conversation with Stanford alum Kyla Zhao, who released her debut novel “The Fraud Squad” earlier this year.

She recalls her days in San Francisco during the pandemic as her “main character energy time.”

“It felt like literal manifestation,” she said, “to show up to that bookstore.”

Reach Zara Irshad:Zara.Irshad@sfchronicle.com