Elizabeth Acevedo Quotes

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.

I think I always go into a project imagining that I’m not going to pour too much of myself into it, and I think it helps that I write for teens, so there’s a distance there—between the kinds of things I’m dealing with versus the things you deal with when you’re 16 and there’s a lot of firsts still to encounter. But I do find that often at some point in the draft—perhaps halfway through—there are things that start coming up that are really things I’m dealing with.

I’ve been lucky to travel to DR to the Mariposa Foundation and so speaking with the young women while I was doing workshops there as to their experience with an area that has a high percentage of sex tourism and also child prostitution and so the research sounds haphazard but it was really my trying to locate each character, their reality and make sure that all of this information doesn’t end up in the book that I had a very clear sense of the world that I am trying to write.

people read like they eat: Sometimes we want comfort, sometimes we want to work to crack something open…Books truly are nourishment for me.

In a way, writing has always been lonely, that’s not really a new thing due to the pandemic per se, but it’s nice that it’s kind of forcing us—forcing you—to find ways to kind of work around that. It’s lonely I think in different ways because there’s the possibility of let’s meet up and write or let me go to an open mic and listen to other writers, and I think we’re finding new creative ways to create that community. Writing has always been lonely but everything else also feels lonely [now] and so to create communal relief somewhere—that felt so important.

It's hard to find stability when you're constantly rotating between the place you are and the place you're from.

I think so often how people, particularly poets, begin first writing out of heartbreak, out of loss. Like I think most people’s early poems are because they are so emotional over something and this is the only form that feels safe, I can get it out on paper, at least that is how I remember writing and when I often encounter a young poet it is because of a thing that they are almost trying to exercise out of themselves and writing is the way to turn… and that does feel like creating from crisis.

(How do you distinguish Y.A. books from adult fiction?) Partly voice, but my own personal ethos is that Y.A. requires hope. I’m less stringent on my requirement for hope in books for adults.

this isn’t new. I think that’s my biggest thing, right? Negritude has been around. It has been a movement in Latin America for years, for decades. And we are finding the language and doing some deep dives, that also may complicate our understanding of our heritage.

What does it mean to say, “Alright, I can be Black and not be Black American and still be in solidarity with Black Americans.” Recognize perhaps we have similarities, but also, like in supporting you, you might have differences. You might have things that you have going on because you generationally lived in this country that I may not understand. So I can stand here and be like, “I am Black, too, but I will be quiet because right now, this is a different beat. I can learn here.”

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.