A poet, an aspiring chef, a healer, and a chess player: Elizabeth Acevedo writes about creative teen girls making their own way in a world that isn’t always kind. It didn’t come as too much of a surprise that Acevedo herself took up a creative hobby during the pandemic lockdown. But the way she brought it back to writing, however, was the revelation.
While discussing having patience during the revision process, Acevedo noted that she had started making candles, and she learned that each candle has a curing time during which it sits untouched before it can be burned. Th is allows the fragrance to fully reveal itself. “That thinking has helped with writing for me,” she said. “Sometimes things just need time to come slowly into their own, to almost get concrete, and then you can start messing with it. So, for me, at least that language feels like it’s just part of the process. It’s curing. It’s not that I’m wasting time or losing time. It’s doing something.”
The process works. Her debut novel, The Poet X, won the National Book Award, a Michael L. Printz Award, and the Pura Belpré Award, among others. Written in verse, it tells the story of Xiomara Batista learning to find her voice, both poetic and otherwise, in the face of challenges at school, church, and home. Acevedo’s sophomore prose novel, With the Fire on High, follows Emoni Santiago’s senior year in high school as she juggles being a teen mother, schoolwork, and the culinary arts class that could potentially change her post-graduation prospects. Her 2020 novel, Clap When You Land, also written in verse, alternates between two sisters, Yahaira in NYC and Camino in Sosúa, Dominican Republic, as they deal with the death of their father in a plane crash—and learn of the other sister’s existence.
In all three novels, Acevedo channels the students she taught as an 8th-grade teacher, the stories they wanted to see on their classroom bookshelves, and what Acevedo herself wanted to read as a young adult. She balances
