Elizabeth Acevedo Quotes

my own growth requires me to be able to forgive.

I don't imagine I'll ever write a book for young people that doesn't include an intergenerational theme — for me that was such a big part of growing up. And I think literature that is contemplating the family, you need the parents coming in and they can't be perfect. They can't, you know, save the day on their own.

I also think of how often, when you’re first-generation, your parents don’t have the ability to self-actualize. They are working, or at least my parents were working to make sure there was food on the table, to make sure there was money they could send back to their own families… There wasn’t a lot of time for my mom to say I’m going to take care of myself and this is a practice and a thing i’m going to do outside of church...to be an immigrant in this country there’s a lot of uncertainty and instability you’re constantly dealing with

I often wish I was asked more about the craft of the verse. I spent so many agonizing hours ensuring every line break was precise, every word and repetition chosen with care—because it was important to me to maintain the integrity of the lyric while also advancing the narrative. It’s that tightrope walk I’m studying in other people’s work and am continuously looking to understand further.

I feel like each book requires a different level of research. “The Poet X” was the most closely aligned with my own upbringing, and I know slam poetry [and] poetry styles pretty well, so it was less research for that book. “With the Fire on High” had a little bit more—she’s afro-Puerto Rican, it’s set in Philadelphia and it has to do with culinary school… so I had to dive in there. She’s also a teen parent.

I didn’t personally have anyone in my family who passed on that crash, but I remember how it ruptured our understanding of each other at that moment—like who was on that flight (AA587 in 2001), what happened, is it terrorism? What does it mean when you lose almost 300 lives in two and a half minutes?

I don’t think writer’s block is real either…but I do think of it as a response to anxiety that oftentimes when we think [what] we have [is] writer’s block [but] what we may be grappling with is that we are uninspired, and that to make you have to also be taking in, and you have to be taking in at the same kind of level as you want to put out. And so if I’m working on a poetry collection it is helpful when I’m reading poetry or if I’m reading with a writer’s eye… Even if I’m not actively writing I’m always percolating, my brain is trying to make meaning and so I want to give it as much nutritious content as I can if that makes sense. And so I think the other thing we say when we say writer’s block is that we’re just stuck—we’re in the middle of something and maybe we don’t know where it goes or we don’t know how to finish the essay… and so we get anxious and tell ourselves we can’t, and I think both of those have an answer but it’s about figuring out what you’re actually dealing with. So, for me, I feel like writer’s block can often be an easy way to relieve yourself of having to do the work of what is it about creativity and this moment that I am stumbling over and how can I address it, right?

Every one of my characters is Black. And every one of my characters wrestles with what that means. I’m trying to think about the many ways that people might come to terms with their race and identity and provide young women reading different blueprints. There are many ways you can be you and that you can exist in your Blackness. And here are some questions you might be wrestling with because I know that I’ve kind of sat in, “what do I call myself?”

I was born and raised in this intersection between Harlem and Columbia University. Very much what felt like in-between worlds. But in a very Dominican immigrant Black community. My journey begins with my listening to my parents tell me stories, and with listening to bolero music and listening to hip hop. I wanted to write music long before I ever considered myself a poet or a writer…

I think that one of the things I've noticed when I've spent time in the Dominican Republic, it's such a diaspora community in terms of who's in the U.S., that even when people feel really satisfied with what they're doing, there's still this desire to see what's in the U.S., what is happening in New York, like, what is this world we're always hearing about?

when it came to having conversations with editors, I felt really prepared to be like, “I want to know how many folks of color you’ve published. I want to know what their trajectories were. I want to know how you support second books.” Right. Not just this one book.

Part of it is finding your readers. Sometimes your readers don’t look like you, or come from your same background, but you get a sense of like, they know what I’m trying to do. They’re not telling me what they would do or telling me what their favorite poet would do. They’re telling me “Okay, based off the work you brought into this room, this is what I’m hearing.” That, to me, is such a generous way of reading because it’s reflecting back what you’re doing and you can figure out if it’s working or not. So, figure out who are your people…

But actually, it was teaching. I was an eighth grade English teacher, Prince George’s County, Maryland. I taught at a school that was 78 percent Latinx, almost 20 percent Black. They had never had an Afro-Latina teaching there at all. So here I am in this space where my students are so representative of the spaces I come from, and yet they had never seen a figure in front of them that reflected their background—and my students were struggling readers. So that was where the first kernel of “Maybe my writing is leading towards my offering something to these students.” That was where the idea of a novel first sprang up.

I think having that longterm vision was helpful. But I want folks to just do the work. Right. Do the research. Information is out there. There’s a lot of ways to hustle even before you’ve been signed to anything.

I think I have a sense of how things need to sound, how to pull an audience in with tone, timing, and pacing. That affects a lot of my writing, too, being hyper aware of how an audience might read something. I want what’s happening on the page to mimic what my body would do on stage. A lot of that came out in the audiobook. I think I would have struggled to record the audiobook without having stage experience because it’s a lot of work to maintain that kind of performance voice.