Elizabeth Acevedo Books in Order

Elizabeth Acevedo was born and raised in Harlem, New York City, in a Dominican family whose stories traveled easily between the city and the Dominican Republic. Her parents' memories of childhood, family, and life in the countryside gave her a rich sense of the past, even while she was growing up surrounded by New York noise, music, and motion.

Words came early. Around age twelve, Acevedo was studying rap lyrics, paying close attention to rhyme, rhythm, and the way a line could carry an idea. She first imagined herself as a rapper, then found her place in poetry.

As a teenager, she began writing and performing, learning through open mics and slam competitions. Spoken-word poetry gave her a direct way to tell stories about the body, family, faith, desire, anger, and the pressures placed on young women. She later became a National Poetry Slam champion, but the work itself has stayed rooted in the simple power of someone standing up and being heard.

Acevedo studied at George Washington University and went on to earn an MFA in creative writing from the University of Maryland in 2015. Before writing full time, she taught eighth-grade English. She also made the leap from a regular job to graduate school and touring as a poet, a move that brought some understandable questions from the people who loved her.

Her early poetry collection, Beastgirl & Other Origin Myths, arrived in 2016. It drew on folklore, Dominican history, Black womanhood, and the many stories people inherit about who they are supposed to be. Those concerns would keep showing up in her later books, often through young people trying to name their own lives.

A few books later, The Poet X changed the scale of her readership. The novel in verse follows Xiomara Batista, a Harlem teen who pours her private thoughts into poems while navigating family expectations and religion. It won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, along with several other major honors.

Acevedo's next young adult novels take different routes into questions of home and possibility. In With the Fire on High, teen mother Emoni Santiago finds hope and direction through cooking. Clap When You Land follows two girls, one in New York and one in the Dominican Republic, after a plane crash reveals the secret connection between them.

Food, faith, family, migration, grief, and the complicated love between parents and children are common threads in her work. Her characters are often carrying adult-sized responsibilities while trying to make room for friendship, art, romance, and a future that feels like their own.

In 2023, Acevedo published her first adult novel, Family Lore, a multigenerational story about Dominican American women in New York and the secrets, gifts, and old hurts that bind them together. She served as Young People's Poet Laureate from 2022 to 2024 and lives in Washington, D.C., with her partner.