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 rep… - Elizabeth Acevedo

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.

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

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…