Elizabeth Acevedo

Elizabeth Acevedo was born on November 15, 1988, in New York City, to Dominican immigrant parents, and grew up in Washington Heights — one of the most vibrant Dominican communities in the United States. Her upbringing between two cultures, in a household rich with Caribbean oral tradition, music, and storytelling, shaped her into the poet and performer she became before her fiction career launched her to international fame. Acevedo competed in slam poetry at the national level, winning the National Poetry Slam championship, and this performance background gave her a distinctive relationship to language — she writes with the rhythm and urgency of speech as much as of the page, and her words are meant to be heard as well as read.

Acevedo’s debut novel-in-verse, The Poet X (2018), tells the story of Xiomara, a Dominican American teenage girl in Harlem who discovers poetry as the one form of expression through which she can be fully herself, navigating the competing demands of her Catholic family’s expectations, her own emerging identity, and the doubts and desires of adolescence. The novel won an astonishing array of honors: the Carnegie Medal, the Pura Belpré Award, the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. It was a debut achievement almost without parallel in recent children’s and young adult literature.

Acevedo reads her own audiobooks, and her performance transforms them into something close to one-woman shows — the Audible recording of The Poet X is widely considered among the finest audiobook performances in the genre. Her subsequent novels, With the Fire on Every Side (2019) and Family Lore (2023, her first adult novel), have demonstrated her range and her consistent ability to render Dominican American experience — particularly female Dominican American experience — with extraordinary richness and power.

Acevedo’s writing is celebrated for the musicality and force of its language, its authentic portrayal of Dominican American family life, and its fierce belief in the power of creative expression as a form of survival and self-determination. She writes about faith, family, identity, and the female body with a directness and beauty that is entirely her own. Elizabeth Acevedo lives in Washington, D.C., and continues to be one of the most important and beloved voices in contemporary literature for young people and beyond.