The Poet X, With the Fire on High, Clap When You Land author Elizabeth Acevedo will have the poetry that put her name on the map come alive in a new illustrated book.
Inheritance: A Visual Poem, illustrated by Andrea Pippins, highlights Elizabeth’s most well-known spoken word poem about being Afro-Latinidad and the traits and struggles she inherited through her racial and ethnic heritage. She recited the poem while performing on the D.C. circuit in 2014, and video of her performance went viral, she wrote in an Instagram post, calling the moment “the jewel in my cap for years.”
They tell me to “fix” my hair.
And by fix, they mean straighten, they mean whiten;
but how do you fix this shipwrecked
history of hair?
Elizabeth Acevedo, Inheritance
“It is very hard to live with a piece of art for over a decade; to carry it memorized as you change, the relationship to the impetus of a piece changes, the relationships discussed in the work change (sadly, revising something every time you have an epiphany is frowned upon, and probably for the best because my little anxious self would never publish anything if I could just keep revising!),” she wrote on Instagram.
Published by HarperCollins Publishers’ imprint Quill Tree Books, the 48-page Inheritance will be released May 3.