Sunday, January 6, 2019

Books: "Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America"





Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America
Edited by Ibi Zoboi
Balzer+Bray, an imprint of HarperCollins Children's Books; hardcover, 416 pages; ages 13 and up; $17.99; available Tuesday, January 8

Ibi Zoboi was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and immigrated to the United States, settling in Bushwick, Brooklyn, with her mother when she was four years old, and she still lives in the borough with her husband and their three children.


Zoboi, the author of the young adult novels American Street and Pride, has compiled a star-studded collection of storied by award-winning, bestselling, and emerging African-American YA authors in Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America.

Curated and edited by Zoboi, this collection features stories from seventeen beloved YA authors: Tracey Baptiste, Coe Booth, Dhonielle Clayton, Brandy Colbert, Jay Coles, Lamar Giles, Leah Henderson, Justina Ireland, Varian Johnson, Kekla Magoon, Tochi Onyebuchi, Jason Reynolds, Nic Stone, Liara Tamani, Renee Watson, and Rita Williams-Garcia, as well as Zoboi herself.

From magical realism to coming of age, fantastic, and utterly real, these dynamic and engaging stories illuminate a wide variety of Black teens' lives and experiences across the country, in cities and rural areas, suburbs and farm towns, in the Northeast, the South, the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, and the Northwest.

"What are the cultural threads that connect Black people all over the world to Africa?" asks Zoboi in the book's introduction. "How have we tried to maintain certain traditions as part of our identity? And as teenagers, do we even care? These are the questions that I had in mind when inviting sixteen other Black authors to write about teens examining, rebelling against, embracing, or simply existing within their own idea of Blackness."

Events for Black Enough:

Tuesday, January 8 at 7:00 PM in Harlem: I, Too Arts Collective and PEN America Launch event at the Langston Hughes House, 20 East 127th Street, Harlem, NY - with story contributors Ibi Zoboi, Renee Watson, Dhonielle Clayton, and Tochi Onyebuchi

Wednesday, January 16 at 7:00 pm in Washington, DC: Politics & Prose (Union Market Location) 1270 5th Street NE, Washington DC 20002 - Moderated by Elizabeth Acevedo, with story contributors Ibi Zoboi, Jason Reynolds, Renee Watson, and Leah Henderson

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