I mean, we knew people who were on the flight. Right? And it really rocked my community. Over 255 people passed, and I remember learning that over 90 percent of the people on the flight were Dominican. This was in 2001, two months after September 11 th. Used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.Įlizabeth Acevedo: Clap When You Land is loosely based on a true story of a flight that crashed on its way from New York City to the Dominican Republic.

Music Credit: “NY” written and performed by Kosta, from the album Soul Sand. She has since published two more highly acclaimed books: With the Fire on High and Clap When You Land.Īcevedo, who has hosted the Poetry Out Loud National Finals a record four times, visited the National Endowment for the Arts podcast to talk about how her own family inflamed her imagination with stories, the profound difficulty of uprooting oneself and leaving one country for another, and the challenges and joy of having deep connections to multiple worlds. Acevedo’s novel The Poet X won the National Book Award for young people’s literature in 2018.

The young women who take center stage in her work are learning to navigate life by both relaxing into and pushing against their upbringings. I even saved up a whole month's worth of allowance when I was in seventh grade so I could make 'Buela a special birthday dinner of filet mignon.“Yes, I am talking about difficult things that are happening in this country, but I also want to talk about the everyday resilience and joy and celebration.” - Elizabeth AcevedoĮlizabeth Acevedo is an Afro-Dominican poet and novelist whose books are alive with Dominican-American and Afro-Caribbean culture and community. Sausages that I watched Italian abuelitas in South Philly make by hand. Fish we'd never heard of that I had to get from a special market down by Penn's Landing. When other kids were saving up their lunch money to buy the latest Jordans, I was saving up mine so I could buy the best ingredients. But 'Buela let me expand to the different things I saw on TV.

I started playing around with the staples of the house: rice, beans, plantains, and chicken. This self-appointed class is the only one I've ever studied well for. I have long lists of ideas for recipes that I can modify or make my own. Like, actual notes in the Notes app on my phone. When other kids were watching Saturday morning cartoons or music videos on YouTube, I was watching Iron Chef, The Great British Baking Show, and old Anthony Bourdain shows and taking notes. “Since my earliest memory, I imagined I would be a chef one day.

With the fire on high elizabeth acevedo