Brooklyn author compiles YA book about being black in America

November 26, 2018 Brooklyn Daily Eagle Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Author and editor Ibi Zoboi Photo by Joseph Zoboi

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From National Book Award finalist Ibi Zoboi, the author of the critically acclaimed novels “Pride” and “American Street,” comes a star-studded collection of stories by award-winning, bestselling and emerging African-American young adult authors on what it’s like to be a black teen in America: “Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America,” which Balzer+Bray /HarperCollins Children’s will publish in hardcover on January 8, 2019.

The collection, curated and edited by Zoboi, features stories from 17 beloved YA authors: Tracey Baptiste, Coe Booth, Dhonielle Clayton, Brandy Colbert, Jay Coles, Lamar Giles, Leah Henderson, Justina Ireland, Varian Johnson, Kekla Magoon, Tochi Onyebuchi, Jason Reynolds, Nic Stone, Liara Tamani, Renee Watson, Rita Williams-Garcia and Zoboi.

From magical realism, to coming of age, fantastic and utterly real — these dynamic and engaging stories illuminate a wide variety of black teens’ lives and experiences across the country, in cities and rural areas, suburbs and farm towns, in the Northeast, the South, the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic and the Northwest.

“What are the cultural threads that connect black people all over the world to Africa? How have we tried to maintain certain traditions as part of our identity? And as teenagers, do we even care? These are the questions I had in mind when inviting 16 other black authors to write about teens examining, rebelling against, embracing or simply existing within their own idea of blackness,” Zoboi writes in the book’s introduction.

Zoboi was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and immigrated to the U.S. when she was 4 years old. She holds an MFA in writing for children and young adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she was a recipient of the Norma Fox Mazer Award. Her award-winning and Pushcart-nominated writing has been published in Haiti Noir, the Caribbean Writer, the New York Times Book Review, The Horn Book magazine and The Rumpus, among other publications. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their three children.