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, … - Elizabeth Acevedo

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

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 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.