The best-selling YA author Elizabeth Acevedo has written her first novel for adults, and it's full of magic

THE KERNEL OF THE STORY THAT WOULD become Family Lore, Elizabeth Acevedo’s first novel for adults, came to her in college, after a visit with one of her aunts in the Bronx.

- NICOLE CHUNG

Acevedo, who’d spent many of her childhood summers hosting cousins from the Dominican Republic or traveling to see family there, had long been curious about her relatives’ linked but disparate histories, and she began to think about how she might tell intergenerational stories loosely inspired by the experiences of the women in her family.

She wouldn’t begin working on Family Lore for another decade. A former eighth-grade English teacher, she’s spent much of her career writing for young people. The Poet X, her 2018 debut novel in verse about a teenage poet in Harlem, won the National Book Award; she followed it up with two more YA best sellers, With the Fire on High in 2019 and Clap When You Land in 2020. Acevedo, who was named the Young People’s Poet Laureate in 2022, thinks she hit her stride as a YA author in part because she understands how to write for young people without talking down to them. “There’s nothing like kids telling me, ‘I’m also a poet and it’s a secret,’ or ‘Xiomara [in The Poet X] makes me feel known,’” she says. It’s one reason she finds widespread book bans so gutting—she worries about young readers being cut off from stories both like and unlike their own.