She's been involved with Poetry Out Loud for five years, hosting the POL finals for the last four, which means we knew her before her first book, The Poet X, won the National Book Award. And let me also say, Elizabeth Acevedo and the Arts Endowment go back a long way. And they have at their centers teenage girls learning to navigate life, relaxing into and pushing against their upbringings. Elizabeth Acevedo is a poet and novelist whose books are alive with Dominican-American and Afro-Caribbean culture and community. And this is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced by the National Endowment for the Arts. She's talking about her recent book, Clap When You Land. Jo Reed: That is author, National Book Award winner, and host of the last four Poetry Out Loud finals, Elizabeth Acevedo. And I've always thought back to that tragedy, the second-worst in United States history, and just wondered, like, something that was so massive for the community I'm from, but very few people know about. We knew people who had relatives on the flight, and the way that they were affected. I mean, we knew people who were on the flight. Right? And it really rocked my community. Over 255 people passed, and I remember learning that over 90 percent of the people on the flight were Dominican. This was in 2001, two months after September 11 th.

Used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.Įlizabeth Acevedo: Clap When You Land is loosely based on a true story of a flight that crashed on its way from New York City to the Dominican Republic. Music Credit: “NY” written and performed by Kosta, from the album Soul Sand.

She has since published two more highly acclaimed books: With the Fire on High and Clap When You Land.Īcevedo, who has hosted the Poetry Out Loud National Finals a record four times, visited the National Endowment for the Arts podcast to talk about how her own family inflamed her imagination with stories, the profound difficulty of uprooting oneself and leaving one country for another, and the challenges and joy of having deep connections to multiple worlds. Acevedo’s novel The Poet X won the National Book Award for young people’s literature in 2018. The young women who take center stage in her work are learning to navigate life by both relaxing into and pushing against their upbringings. “Yes, I am talking about difficult things that are happening in this country, but I also want to talk about the everyday resilience and joy and celebration.” - Elizabeth AcevedoĮlizabeth Acevedo is an Afro-Dominican poet and novelist whose books are alive with Dominican-American and Afro-Caribbean culture and community.

With the fire on high elizabeth acevedo