Texas track star and sci-fi author honed his skills in Pittsburgh

Author, Division I athlete, and University of Texas at Austin student Osawese Agbonkonkon has another important bullet point on his resume: he is from Pittsburgh. The 21-year-old published his first book, Psychic Suit, in 2024 and is now currently working on his second novel. The story of Psychic Suit is a YA action-adventure novel with bits of sci-fi, thriller and urban fantasy themes. “I wanted to tackle war, politics, and several heavier themes in it as well,” Agbonkonkon tells Pittsburgh City Paper.  The book follows a group of characters blessed with powers by an alien organization who steal a powerful metal and use it to perform terrorist attacks across planet Earth. Agbonkonkon’s protagonists must then go and stop them. While he started Psychic Suit at age 13, he found that these disparate elements didn’t start flowing together in his writing until he was around 15 years old.  “I was probably politically literate enough to understand them,” Agbonkonkon says. “As I’ve gotten older, it’s gotten easier to talk about that stuff, and when I question whether I should have handled [those elements] a certain way, it’s trusting that I did enough editing to understand that I did handle them in the right way.” Agbonkonkon’s debut novel Psychic Suit Credit: Osawese Agbonkonkon He credits a Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) test as what originally inspired him to pursue creative writing. Usually, standardized tests are dreaded by most middle schoolers, but not Agbonkonkon. “The prompt was to write your own story,” he says. “I was writing a story for the test and later that day, I went home and found one of my dad’s old binders and got a bunch of lined paper and just started writing.” Agbonkonkon also credits his fifth grade teacher at Marshall Middle School in Wexford, Kristen Zaccari, as helping him grow his passion for writing. Some of Agbonkonkon’s favorite books and authors inclu