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Hello! I’m Gail Nobles. Today on Ebonliner I’m going to talk about Ibi Zoboi. She is a Haitian-American author of
young adult fiction. She is best known for her young adult novel American Street, which was a finalist for the
National Book Award for Young Adult's Literature in 2017. She is also the author of
Pride, Nigeria Jones, Punching The Air, Black Enough, & My Life Is An Ice Cream Sandwich, a New York Times bestseller.
Her debut novel
American Street, about a Haitian teen whose mother gets detained when they first immigrate to America, explores
magical realism, immigration, and
voodou culture, all based on the author's on experiences as a Haitian-American immigrant.
Zoboi edited the young adult anthology
Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America, published in 2019 by Balzer + Bray. Black Enough received starred reviews from
Publishers Weekly,
Kirkus Reviews, and
Booklist. It appeared on the 2020 Bank Street Children's Book Committee's Best Books of the Year List with an "Outstanding Merit" distinction.
Zoboi's 2018 novel
Pride is a re-telling of
Jane Austen's 1813 novel
Pride and Prejudice, set in the
Bushwick neighborhood of
Brooklyn, New York.
My Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich, Zoboi's 2019 middle-grade novel, is about Ebony-Grace, a girl who is sent from Alabama to help her grandfather in Harlem in the 1980s and is her first middle grade book. As a young black girl who enjoys the science-fiction worlds of Star Wars and Star Trek, Ebony-Grace is seen as an "ice cream sandwich" by her peers; brown on the outside, but white on the inside.
You can buy Ibi Zoboi’s books at Barnes &Noble & Amazon. Zoboi has some pretty good ratings on her books at Amazon. To learn more about Ibi Zoboi go to https://ibizoboi.net.