Elizabeth Acevedo’s Work Is a Welcome Rarity in Young-Adult Fiction | The Atlantic

The National Book Award–winning author writes complex teenage protagonists whose real-life counterparts have long faced literary erasure.

The night that Elizabeth Acevedo’s debut novel won the 2018 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the author celebrated by retreating into a familiar comfort. She headed straight uptown to her mother’s apartment that crisp November evening and treated herself to the aromatic meal that had been a hallmark of her New York City upbringing. “It was like midnight at that point. And I ate a bowl of sancocho while [my family] passed around the award and took pictures,” she said when we spoke recently. Pointing to an imaginary serving of the traditional, meat-and-vegetable-heavy stew her family eats in Harlem and on each trip back to her parents’ native Dominican Republic, she added: “I was like, ‘This is winning.’”

[Featured Image: MAKEBA RAINEY / STEPHANIE IFENDU]

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