The EbonLiner

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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.