Elizabeth Acevedo
Renowned Spoken Word Poet
National Book Award-winner
NY Times Bestselling Novelist
National Poetry Slam Champion
Readings &
Lecture Topics
- Inheritance
- Clap When You Land
- With the Fire on High
- The Poet X
- An Evening with Elizabeth Acevedo
Biography
“In nearly every poem, there is at least one universal truth about adolescence, family, gender, race, religion, or sexuality that will have readers either nodding in grateful acknowledgment or blinking away tears.” –Horn Book
“Poignant and real, beautiful and intense.” –Kirkus Review, starred review
A poet and novelist, Elizabeth Acevedo is the author the New York Times-bestselling author of The Poet X, which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, the Pura Belpré Award, the Carnegie medal, the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, and the Walter Award. She is also the author of Family Lore, which won the NAACP Image Award in Fiction, was shortlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and was a Good Morning America Book Club pick; With the Fire on High, named a best book of the year by the New York Public Library, NPR,Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal; and Clap When You Land, which was a Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor book and a Kirkus finalist.
Her first novel for adults, Family Lore, follows four Dominican-American sisters who gather together for a living wake, where gifts of death prediction stir up secrets and forces the extended family to confront their lives. About the book, Kiese Laymon said: “Only Elizabeth Acevedo could make an epic feel so intimate, so perfectly crafted and tightly drawn. No writer on earth transforms a page into a home with distinct emotional chambers like Acevedo, and her she does it with language that is equally lush and lacerating. This is how stories should be made.” Deesha Philyaw observed: “There’s deep magic not only among the close-knit Marte sisters and their offspring, but on every page of Family Lore. This book is at turns tender, intense, sensual, and hilarious… Elizabeth Acevedo’s precise, intricate prose mesmerizes, surprises, and delights. This is a family saga to be read with your whole heart and soul.”
When asked about the complexities of writing towards family dynamics, particularly between sisters and mothers and daughters, Acevedo reflected: “I write what haunts me. [This kind of writing] is reconsidering what it means to be a part of a community for yourself, not how perfectly you can perform yourself. I still don’t recognize sometimes how I’m thinking of every single person in my life and whether or not they’ll approve. So my novels agitate these webs because my mind agitates those webs. I think what Family Lore does that’s special is it reaches farther back than any of my other books to show historically how these dynamics of dysfunction were created within a family and are being undone or at least questioned… I think this book is demonstrative of my being less concerned with being liked, or with earning love, and more of my groundedness in what needs to be said in this particular moment.”
Named the 2022 Young People’s Poet Laureate, Acevedo has been a fellow of Cave Canem, Cantomundo, and a participant in the Callaloo Writer’s Workshops. She holds a BA in Performing Arts from The George Washington University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland.
She is a National Poetry Slam Champion, and resides in Washington, DC with her love.
Short Bio
Elizabeth Acevedo was the 2022 Young People’s Poet Laureate and the New York Times-bestselling author of The Poet X, which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, the Pura Belpré Award, the Carnegie medal, the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, and the Walter Award. She is also the author of With the Fire on High—which was named a best book of the year by the New York Public Library, NPR, Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal—and Clap When You Land, which was a Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor book and a Kirkus finalist. She holds a BA in Performing Arts from The George Washington University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland. Acevedo has been a fellow of Cave Canem, Cantomundo, and a participant in the Callaloo Writer’s Workshops. She is a National Poetry Slam Champion, and resides in Washington, DC with her love.
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Publications
Family Lore
Novel, 2023
Flor has a gift: she can predict, to the day, when someone will die. So when she decides she wants a living wake—a party to bring her family and community together to celebrate the long life she’s led—her sisters are surprised. Has Flor foreseen her own death, or someone else’s? Does she have other motives? She refuses to tell her sisters, Matilde, Pastora, and Camila.
But Flor isn’t the only person with secrets: her sisters are hiding things, too. And the next generation, cousins Ona and Yadi, face tumult of their own.
Spanning the three days prior to the wake, Family Lore traces the lives of each of the Marte women, weaving together past and present, Santo Domingo and New York City. Told with Elizabeth Acevedo’s inimitable and incandescent voice, this is an indelible portrait of sisters and cousins, aunts and nieces—one family’s journey through their history, helping them better navigate all that is to come.
Inheritance: A Visual Poem
Poetry, 2022
In her most famous spoken-word poem, author of the Pura Belpré-winning novel-in-verse The Poet X Elizabeth Acevedo embraces all the complexities of Black hair and Afro-Latinidad—the history, pain, pride, and powerful love of that inheritance.
Paired with full-color illustrations by artist Andrea Pippins in a format that will appeal to fans of Mahogany L. Browne’s Black Girl Magic or Jason Reynolds’s For Everyone, this poem can now be read in a vibrant package, making it the ideal gift, treasure, or inspiration for readers of any age.
With the Fire On High
Novel, 2021
Ever since she got pregnant freshman year, Emoni Santiago’s life has been about making the tough decisions—doing what has to be done for her daughter and her abuela. The one place she can let all that go is in the kitchen, where she adds a little something magical to everything she cooks, turning her food into straight-up goodness. Even though she dreams of working as a chef after she graduates, Emoni knows that it’s not worth her time to pursue the impossible. Yet despite the rules she thinks she has to play by, once Emoni starts cooking, her only choice is to let her talent break free.
Clap When You Land
Novel, 2020
In a novel-in-verse that brims with grief and love, National Book Award-winning and New York Times-bestselling author Elizabeth Acevedo writes about the devastation of loss, the difficulty of forgiveness, and the bittersweet bonds that shape our lives. Camino Rios lives for the summers when her father visits her in the Dominican Republic. But this time, on the day when his plane is supposed to land, Camino arrives at the airport to see crowds of crying people. In New York City, Yahaira Rios is called to the principal’s office, where her mother is waiting to tell her that her father, her hero, has died in a plane crash. Separated by distance—and Papi’s secrets—the two girls are forced to face a new reality in which their father is dead and their lives are forever altered. And then, when it seems like they’ve lost everything of their father, they learn of each other.
The Poet X
Novel, 2020
“Crackles with energy and snaps with authenticity and voice.” —Justina Ireland
Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking. But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers—especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about. With Mami’s determination to force her daughter to obey the laws of the church, Xiomara understands that her thoughts are best kept to herself. So when she is invited to join her school’s slam poetry club, she doesn’t know how she could ever attend without her mami finding out. But she still can’t stop thinking about performing her poems. Because in the face of a world that may not want to hear her, Xiomara refuses to be silent.
Beast Girl and Other Origin Myths
Poetry, 2016
Beastgirl & Other Origin Myths by Elizabeth Acevedo is the first title in YesYes Books’ Blue Note Edition Chapbook Series. Beastgirl & Other Origin Myths is a collection of folkloric poems centered on the historical, mythological, gendered, and geographic experiences of a first generation American woman. From the border in the Dominican Republic, to the bustling streets of New York City, Acevedo considers how some bodies must walk through the world as beastly beings. How these forgotten myths be both blessing and birthright.
Articles & Audio
Read What’s In Print
• 6 Trailblazing Afro Latinas You and Your Kids Should Know – PBS
• The Best Black History Month Reads, According To This Year’s Debut Authors – Bustle
• 15 YA Romance Books That Perfectly Capture Teenage Love – Good Housekeeping
• Elizabeth Acevedo Understands That ‘People Read Like They Eat’ – NY Times
• Clap When You Land wins Young Adult Audie Award – PRWEB
• Caught Between Worlds? For Elizabeth Acevedo, It’s a Familiar Feeling – New York Times
• Best Young Adult Books of 2019 — NYPL
• Best Young Adult Books of 2019 — Publishers Weekly
• Carnegie medal goes to first writer of colour in its 83-year history — The Guardian
• Elizabeth Acevedo’s New Novel Is Literary Soul Food — New York Times
• With The Fire On High Cooks Up A Powerful Message — NPR
• Elizabeth Acevedo Gives Young Readers Of Color A Story Of Joy — Bustle
• Elizabeth Acevedo returns with another indelible teen heroine — Washington Post
• Elizabeth Acevedo Coming-of-Age Novel The Poet X Wins the Pura Belpré Award – Remezcla
• Acevedo Wins 2019 Michael L. Printz Award for The Poet X — Publisher’s Weekly
• Speaking Truth, Beautifully, to Shattered Young People – New York Times
• Q&A with Elizabeth Acevedo — Publisher’s Weekly
• Full-length Book Review of The Poet X by Leila Roy — Kirkus Review
• The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo — SLJ Review
• An Interview With Elizabeth Acevedo — Harriet (Poetry Foundation)
• Afro-Latina Slam Poet, Elizabeth Acevedo, Debuts First Novel — Latina Magazine
• Slam Poet Elizabeth Acevedo Debuts Novel, The Poet X — Teen Vogue
• The X Files: Elizabeth Acevedo and the Poetry of Young Identity — Village Voice
• Elizabeth Acevedo on Her New Book, Latinx Representation, and Why Poetry Is Political – Elle
• Epic Reads Partners with Emma Roberts’s Book Club on ‘Why Not YA?’ — Publisher’s Weekly
Listen to Audio
• Tragedy Reveals 2 Secret Families in Clap When You Land – NPR
• Portrait Of: Elizabeth Acevedo — Latino USA
• Elizabeth Acevedo on The Poet X – Harper Audio
• Elizabeth Acevedo Reads “Iron” — The Poetry Magazine Podcast
• Think you’re not a poetry person? Let Elizabeth Acevedo change your mind — America Magazine
Selected Writings
• Read “Ode to the Head Nod” – Poets.org
IN TRANSLATION
My mouth cannot write you a white flag.
It will never be a Bible verse.
My mouth cannot be shaped into the apology
you say both you and God deserve.
And you want to make it seem
it’s my mouth’s entire fault.
Because it was hungry,
and silent, but what about your mouth:
how your lips are staples
that pierce me quick and hard.
And the words I never say
are better left on my tongue
since they would only have slammed
against the closed door of your back.
Your silence furnishes a dark house.
But even at the risk of burning
the moth always seeks the light.
—excerpted from the novel in verse, THE POET X
IRON
And although I am a poet, I am not the bullet;
I will not heat-search the soft points.
I am not the coroner who will graze her hand
over naked knees. Who will swish her fingers
in the mouth. Who will flip the body over, her eye a hook
fishing for government-issued lead.
I am not the sidewalk, which is unsurprised
as another cheek scrapes harsh against it.
Although I too enjoy soft palms on me;
enjoy when he rests on my body with a hard breath;
I have clasped
this man inside me and released him again and again,
listening to him die thousands of little deaths.
What is a good metaphor for a woman who loves in a time like this?
I am no scalpel or high thread count sheet. Not a gavel, or hand-painted teacup.
I am neither nor romanced by the streetlamp nor candlelight;
my hands are not an iron, but look, they’re hot, look
how I place them in love on his skin
and am still able to unwrinkle his spine.
