Prior to publishing her first novel, Zoboi wrote short stories including one story titled The Farming of Gods which was published in 2012 and features a setting of a post apocalyptic Haiti following the 2010 Haiti Earthquake. The project helps both Haitian girls, as well as Caribbean girls.
The project was named for the Taino queen Anacaona. According to Zoboi, one of the reasons she started this workshop was to give Haitian girls a voice and ways to see themselves in literature. Through Kickstarter, Zoboi was able to fund the Daughters of Anacaona Writing Project, a creative writing workshop in Port-au-Prince. While working on her MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults, she was chosen as a finalist for the New Visions Award before publishing her debut novel. In 2018, Zoboi received the Americas Award for Children's and Young Adult Literature from the Library of Congress. Zoboi is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop as well as a winner of the 2011 Gulliver Travel Grant.
Zoboi began her writing career as an investigative reporter and worked among others with Octavia Butler. Zoboi took her husband's surname at marriage and changed her first name to Ibi, a Yoruba word for "rebirth", reflecting her birth name, Pascale, which is related to Easter. Interested in writing, she took classes in creative writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and graduated with her MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults. She turned to poetry and writing as a way for her to be seen.īefore becoming an author, Zoboi worked at a newspaper and in a bookstore. After her return, her teachers placed her in an English as a Second Language course when she was in the fifth grade, wrongly assuming that Zoboi couldn't speak English. Zoboi stayed in Haiti with relatives for three months while her mother worked to get her back. When they tried to return to the United States, Zoboi was not allowed to return. Four years later, Zoboi returned to Haiti for a visit with her mother. She cites the move from Haiti to New York as one that defined her. The move was hard on Zoboi, who found Brooklyn to be lonely, as her family was in Haiti and her mother worked.
Early life īorn in Haiti as Pascale Philantrope, Zoboi immigrated from Port-au-Prince with her mother at age four and grew up in Bushwick, Brooklyn, in the 1980s. 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. Ibi Zoboi is a Haitian-American author of young adult fiction. MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults Ibi Zoboi receives a 2018 Americas Award from the Library of Congress
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