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| photo: Stephanie Ifendu | |
Elizabeth Acevedo is an Afro-Dominican author and performer who was named the 2019 Michael L. Printz Award winner for The Poet X (HarperCollins), announced earlier this week at ALA Midwinter in Seattle, Wash.
Shelf Awareness: Congratulations! One day, one book, three awards: the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature, the Pura Belpré Author Award winner and an Odyssey Honor for your performance in The Poet X audiobook! How are you feeling?
I am feeling so many things at once, I'm not entirely sure how to process it all, honestly. I'm thrilled. I'm humbled. I keep wanting to simultaneously fist bump strangers and then weep on their shoulders. To have so many different committees see something special in The Poet X has been a magical feeling.
The Poet X was your first book for young adults. What has it been like to watch your work receive honor after honor and so very much praise?
The Poet X is my first full-length book, and my first novel. So in many ways when I committed to telling this story I had no real sense of who my readers would be or if they would be open to this kind of story. To see so many celebrate my wins alongside me is almost as amazing as the win itself. So many readers cheered for The Poet X even though they've never met me, and it's this wonderous feeling of, "Of course. That whole time I had my head down, and didn't know who would care about Xiomara, and wasn't sure this book would make a ripple, forget a splash, there you all were waiting to embrace this book." The honors feel like they are affirming and praising more than this book and more than I could ever imagine.
You're a National Poetry Slam Champion. Did The Poet X start as a spoken-word piece or did the writing come first?
The Poet X always began as a novel in verse. A novel that was going to use the conceit of poetry slams and spoken word as a way to show how a young woman who is afraid of her body and her voice uses both to step into her most powerful self. There are certain pieces in the novel that I would read out loud to myself again and again and I knew there was something powerful in the language that made that particular piece of verse want to be heard. And there are pieces in the novel that act as hinges, they are there to move you to the next section, to keep the action moving. It was hard for me to learn the balance, but I think I got close. Performing the audiobook was a lot of fun! Thankfully, by the time we recorded, I had been reading from the novel while at speaking engagements, so several parts of the novel were committed to memory and lived in my body. Then there were parts of the novel I had to teach myself how to read out loud because ultimately this is Xiomara's journal, and not every piece was meant to be heard, it was her scribbling madly to get the most urgent things off her chest.
Running from that, how does it feel to be recognized like this for both your written and spoken art?
Ah. This is truly wonderful. I'm a baby narrator. I had no idea what I was doing. But my audiobook director, Caitlin Garing, is a rock star and she heard nuance in the text even I missed. Together we made our way through, and it's powerful to me when readers send me pictures of pages they love, and sections they've underlined and when they send me pictures of how far along they've gotten in the audiobook, or tweets telling me they didn't get out of their cars so they could keep listening. It affirms that poetry should be read, and heard, and spoken, and loved, and it should be a part of our daily lives.
On this side of such a big year, what are you most hoping readers take from your work?
That our words matter, and they change the world. As humans we lean into story. So we have to be intentional and empathetic with the stories we tell others and the stories we choose to believe about ourselves.
You have a new novel coming out very soon--how do you feel it relates to The Poet X, if at all?
With the Fire on High [HarperCollins, May 7] is also about a young woman coming into her own, although Emoni Santiago has very different challenges than Xiomara. With Emoni you'll find a teen who wants to be a chef, wants to leave her mark on the world, and wants to be a good mother to her very young child. It's a sweet (and savory) story about the hard decisions young people have to make, but the ways they can be innovative in following their dreams.
Thank you so much for talking to Shelf! And congratulations again!