Elizabeth Acevedo

Elected Young People’s Poet Laureate in 2022, former schoolteacher Elizabeth Acevedo has a string of awards to her name, for her poetry performances as well as her fiction. ...

Raised in Harlem in the 1990s, Acevedo grew up around the Catholic church that she attended with her mother, who had moved to New York from the Dominican Republic. Her early love of the spoken word led Acevedo to take to the stage, aged just 14, for open mic events and poetry slams. After becoming a National Poetry Slam Champion in 2014 and graduating from the University of Maryland with a masters in Creative Writing the following year, she began to tour more widely, performing her poetry, talking about her experiences as a Black Latina in America and delivering TED Talks.

Her writing career began with Beastgirl and Other Origin Myths (2016) – a collection of poems exploring Dominican legends – then a multi-award winning novel, The Poet X (2018), which features a teenager managing the conflict in her family by writing poetry. Knowing from her teaching days that the lack of diversity in fiction discouraged students of colour from reading, Acevedo continued to produce novels for young adults, and the acclaimed With the Fire on High and Clap When you Land secured her a place on the New York Times bestsellers list.

Keen to take up a new challenge, Acevedo recently wrote a novel for adults and published Family Lore in August 2023.