By MATTHEW STOSS
GW Magazine / Summer 2018

The villain in Elizabeth Acevedo’s debut novel, The Poet X, is a mean and imperious mother, of whom Acevedo thinks I could be more understanding.

“You think she’s that evil?” Acevedo says.

“When she [REDACTED AS TO NOT SPOIL THE MOTHER’S VILLAINY], that is horrible,” I say. “I was walking from the train while I was reading this and I actually cursed out loud and someone walked by me and looked at me funny. [ALSO REDACTED] is such a vindictive thing to do.”

Acevedo, BA ’10, is the 30-year-old fierce, funny and coily-haired daughter of Dominican immigrants. Everyone calls her Liz.

She grew up in New York City not far from Columbia University, reading and writing, and rapping with her older brothers and their friends on the corner of 109th and Amsterdam in front of a deli that has the word “cigarettes” misspelled on its awning. The block is bookended by a couple of Catholic churches, the one more opulent than the other. The Acevedos went to the other.

Acevedo is an author, poet and spoken-word performer who has gigged at, among other venues of some size, Madison Square Garden, the Kennedy Center and the South African State Theatre in Pretoria. She’s given TED Talks and been featured on BET, and her YouTube videos go occasionally viral.

As part of the D.C. Beltway Poetry Slam team, she won the 2014 National Poetry Slam in Oakland, Calif., topping a field of more than 70, and in 2016, she finished eighth out of 96 at the Women of the World Poetry Slam in Brooklyn, N.Y.

After GW, Acevedo matriculated through the D.C. poetry scene for a few years, anchoring slams and spoken-word shows at various bookstores, bars and cafes, building a following and getting an agent and finally turning professional in 2014.

Before she became a New York Times best-selling author this spring, Acevedo toured the country, averaging more than 100 stops a year, mostly at college campuses. Her most-attended shows drew hundreds, and the top poets on the circuit, according to Acevedo’s agent Scott Talarico, can earn as much as $5,000 for a performance. She has since halved her touring, in part, because of obligations to her publisher.

She’s writing a second novel and promoting The Poet X, a lightly autobiographical young-adult novel-in-verse released in March. A quick-reading-but-emotionally-hefty 30,000 words, The Poet X centers on the coming-of-age of a 15-year-old Dominican-American girl named Xiomara Batista and how she uses poetry to understand her agency and her sexuality. Both seem to belong to everyone but her, notably the Catholic church and its ultramontane devotee: Xiomara’s mother.

“The reason the mom is such a good villain is you can see her point of view,” I say to Acevedo. “That’s probably why I hated her so much. She wasn’t wrong. I mean, she was wrong but there is a rational argument for her side, which makes her much more three-dimensional than just being a Bond villain, and that’s why I hated her so much and that’s why [VILLAINY REDACTED ONE MORE TIME]. I needed her to repent, to say that maybe she shouldn’t be so extreme.”

“But do our parents do that?” Acevedo says. “Do our parents apologize? I think they might, but not with words, right? I think the mom changes. She’s just not going to apologize. So much of the book is about what do we have the language to say? What are we able to communicate? And this character literally does not have the language in which to talk to her kids.”

The mother speaks only Spanish. Her two children are bilingual.

“Did you make her an older woman for that reason?” I say.

Acevedo and I are in the white-light window of a café that’s also a bike shop and a hardware store. It’s just off the waterfront in Southwest D.C., where Acevedo lives with her husband, Shakir Cannon-Moye, BBA ’10, MBA ’12, and where the fish smell stays low in the wind.

It’s a hot early weekday afternoon, and Acevedo is drinking a pink tea through a straw, and her big hair isn’t so coily right now. She’s got it up in a business-serious samurai bun. For the moment, she can traverse doorways without an act of geometry.

“I wanted it to be this generational, old-school thing,” Acevedo says. “This also is very reflective of the Bible. These older women having kids. This idea of miracles—how else could this have possibly happened, right? And raising kids is different when you’re 45, and it’s, again, about language. I think with certain communities, when you’re an older immigrant, you’re holding onto your values in a way that is not going to be like a 20-year-old who just moved here—who can still maybe get some English, who is open to a new place.”

It is the religious conflict in The Poet X that appealed to Rosemary Brosnan when over Memorial Day weekend in 2016 she read Elizabeth Acevedo’s then-four-year-old manuscript of a young-adult novel-in-verse.

“In books for kids and teens, religion is often left out unless it’s being published by a religious publisher,” says Brosnan, a vice president and editorial director at HarperCollins, where she signed Acevedo to a multi-book deal and now serves as her editor. “But to have a book that shows a teen questioning her mom’s view on religion, I think that that’s important. I think religion is a part of a lot of kids’ lives.”

Brosnan, a 20-some-year publishing industry vet, is chatting by landline from her office in New York, not too far from the Mexican restaurant in Tribeca where on July 26, 2016, she first met Acevedo face-to-face and they bonded over a mutual love of poetry, especially the writing of Lucille Clifton, who, along with Natalie Diaz and Nikki Giovanni, is among Acevedo’s most enduring influences.

Off the top of my head, I propose to Brosnan a reason for the lack of religious plots in young-adult novels: Religion is delicate, and the printing of books in which its supremacy is submarined might make publishers financially wary of parents high on indignation and the perceived defenestration of traditional values.

“I don’t think so,” Brosnan says.

Yeah, just kidding.

“I’m not seeing the manuscripts,” she continues. “I don’t know that people are really writing them. It’s not that we won’t publish them. Maybe the people who write the books tend to be more secular? I don’t know. ... I think it really depends on the author.”

Acevedo, like her novel’s protagonist Xiomara—pronounced “See-oh-mara”—is Catholic, although admittedly not a very good one. She veers ever nearer to apostasy.

Brosnan says the heady concepts and the crisp verse in The Poet X compelled her to buy the book, describing Acevedo’s writing as well-crafted and the diction well-suffered.

“Each poem stands on its own as a gem,” Brosnan says. “It’s very difficult to write a novel-in-verse and write all these poems that are connecting poems between scenes. You have to have the story follow just as you would in a prose novel.”

Acevedo’s contracted to produce about a book a year through 2021 for HarperCollins. The next one, With the Fire on High, scheduled to come out in spring 2019, is about a teen mother who becomes a chef. It’s a prose novel, unlike The Poet X, which Acevedo finished in March 2016, abandoning all but 10 of 50 or so pages from her first go at the novel in 2012. She restarted it in January 2016 and had a book deal by June.

The novel spent four weeks on The New York Times Best Sellers list, a feat buoyed by Acevedo’s four years of touring and an indie bookstore renaissance that, according to American Booksellers Association CEO Oren Teicher, has been more than partially powered by the localization movement and minority demographics. From the 2009 to 2017, the number of independent bookstores has gone up every year, jumping from 1,651 in to 2,321.

The Poet X stars, among other minority characters, a Dominican-American teenage girl and her gay twin brother and nary a straight white guy.

“I think all kids should be represented in books and see themselves in books,” Brosnan says. “That wasn’t really happening enough, so that was another thing that I just loved about this story.”

Brosnan says most of her emendings to The Poet X focused on Acevedo beefing up the boyfriend character, a biology lab partner named Aman who supports Xiomara and her writing unconditionally. Few, if any, edits involved surgery on the actual writing.

The integrity and the philosophies of the book arrived intact, Brosnan says, unique and all but fully formed, especially the big one.

“I liked the exploration of this very religious family and the mother in particular,” Brosnan says, “and her influence on Xiomara and how strict she was and how Xiomara was trying to figure out her own ideas about religion and where they fit in. I just really like this girl coming into her own and finding her voice.”

But isn’t the mother horrid?

“Maybe it’s because I’m a mom but I had some sympathy for her,” Brosnan says, “which is interesting because she was really terrible to Xiomara and the [REDACTED AGAIN] made me almost physically sick. It was really just so powerful. But I did have some sympathy for her because I imagined this was her background, and maybe the way she was raised, and she felt like she was losing control of her daughter.”

In the café that’s also a bike shop and a hardware store, Liz Acevedo is in a corner by the glassy café counter, adjacent to the pastries and a sighing blonde barista.

Acevedo’s facing the white light in the white window and the joggers and the baby strollers and the cyclists progressing upon the bike trail that rubs up Maine Avenue SW. She’s expressive and intellectual even when she’s not saying things. And then, she says things.

“I think my aesthetic and my politics are centered in a very particular area. My interest is in a particular narrative and it’s typically not white men. I can recognize a lot of names and a lot of poems. I can talk about, like, why Whitman was who he was.”

I’ve asked about her poetry education and her fluency in the classics.

At GW, Acevedo patchworked an interdisciplinary studies major from sundry courses plucked from relevant majors. In high school, after competing, and nearly dominating, her first poetry slam, she knew by age 15 that she wanted poetry to be her career and as an undergraduate she built a degree curated from performing arts and English and sociology classes.

In 2012, after a tour in Teach for America where she taught eighth-graders and met and befriended poet, scholar and future D.C. Beltway Poetry Slam teammate Clint Smith, Acevedo went to the University of Maryland. In College Park, she got an MFA in creative writing in 2015 and served as an adjunct professor, teaching 100-level English classes to freshmen and creative writing.

By 2014, other poets urged her to commit to poetry full time. Smith was one of those poets.

“She was sort of a young prodigy coming out of New York City,” Smith says. “I had seen YouTube videos of her performing, so when people said ‘Liz Acevedo,’ I remembered the name. I remembered seeing videos of her when she was like 17 or 18 years old and winning poetry slams in New York, and she had this unique style. I think a lot of poets try to emulate other poets, especially when they’re first starting out, but I think one thing about Liz is she very much found her own style very early, and that was very clear when you watched her work. Liz has this really remarkable ability to hold many truths at once.”

Acevedo still did spoken-word shows and poetry slams in her spare time at GW and Maryland, treating the performances as something more than a hobby but less than a career. She hit open mics and et cetera, going underground and building a style.

Smith says Acevedo has avoided spoken-word and slam poet clichés. She doesn’t rely on personal trauma for cheap points or treat a hot mic as a confessional. Instead, she mustered her hip-hop bravado and swaddled it with her literary acumen, humor—Acevedo’s act is at least one-half stand-up—and personal experience. She integrates Spanish as well as Dominican slang, for example.

“She brought the world that she occupied as a young person growing up in a specific community,” Smith says. “She grew up in Harlem. She brought the Dominican Republic. She brought being black in America. She brought all of these tensions. She was almost the embodiment of intersectionality.”

Of course, Acevedo learned Western poetry canon over those six years of college but little of it, she says, looked or sounded like her. It looked and sounded like everything else.

“I would look at folks and say, ‘This is an interesting thing,’” Acevedo says, “but it’s hard for me to be fully invested in narratives where I’m nonexistent or my community is nonexistent. I can enjoy it—like, ‘That was interesting wordplay, that was interesting language’ or even ‘that was a fascinating way to talk about love or this is a clear emotional truth,’ but there’s always going to be distance for me.”

“That’s how I felt when I started reading this,” I say, pointing to my hardback copy of The Poet X on the table in the white light. There’s also a copy of Beast Girl & Other Origin Myths, Acevedo’s 2016 poetry collection, and her pink tea. “I was like, ‘There’s no way there’s going to be anything in this for me.’ But this one poem was the first thing that really hooked me because it reminded me of when I was in [Catholic] middle school and I asked a teacher why Jesus wasn’t a girl.”

“That’s a good question, Matt. Asking the important questions.”

“It wasn’t because I had—”

“A big political agenda?”

“Ha, no. I was just being difficult. But this line in this poem about how the holy trinity didn’t include the mother got to me.”

On page 14 of The Poet X, there is a poem called “God.” It’s part manifesto and part polemic and establishes Xiomara’s religious aggrievement and her struggle against catechism and by extension her mother, who wields her faith like a ferule. A stanza of “God” says, “About a holy trinity/that don’t include the mother./It’s all the things.”

The two ensuing stanzas plus one line say, “Just seems as I got older/I began to really see/the way that the church/treats a girl like me differently./Sometimes it feels/all I’m worth is under my skirt/and not between my ears.”

The poem establishes the novel’s tone and perhaps even its thesis, and every conflict to follow has at least a tendril from “God” stabbing somewhere inside it. Verses like those in “God” pervade Acevedo’s work.

Her poetry is quiet, loud, comedic, heartbreaking, heavy, bemusing, profane, dark and defiant. Her poems explore and vivisect religion, gender, race, sex and politics and parse the anomie they wreak. She spotlights ignored identities and pulls point-of-view characters from the end of the historically staid literary bench.

Acevedo has said in so many interviews that she wrote The Poet X to be the book she wanted to read as a child but couldn’t because it didn’t exist. She says so again now, reasonably elated bookstores all over Washington stock The Poet X, including her local Southwest D.C. location of Politics and Prose, where it’s snugged seven shelves high on a right-hand wall.

Acevedo also clarifies that The Poet X, while autobiographical in essence, isn’t a confession, veiled or otherwise.

“My emotional truths are my own,” she says. “It is most certainly fiction and it is fictionalized. There’s no way I would ever paint this as a covert memoir. I have no twin, my relationship with my mother was very different. My mother was not as staunchly Catholic. … My writing was very sacred in my house. My journals were always left untouched and my family was very supportive. My family was very good about ‘Liz wants to be a rapper.’ They rallied around this very untraditional girl doing this thing, and ‘Yeah, she’s our storyteller,’ and I think that automatically changes the whole tension.

“But did I grow up in a strict household? Was I challenged from an early age and hyper-aware of my own body and my interactions with men? Yes. Was I someone who was very confused by what, religiously, I was being told? Yes.”

At the hardware-bike café, Liz Acevedo told a story about the nascence of her street corner hip-hop career, the implication being that as a 10-year-old, she either didn’t know how rap worked, or if she did, she tried to circumvent established protocol.

“She would [rap] in a flow but she would be reading it—like, from an index card,” her oldest brother, Alberto Acevedo, says. He’s 38 now and works as a business analyst in New York.

Alberto says something like 15 guys would hang out at the corner of 109th and Amsterdam in Morningside Heights, in front of the ungrammatical deli and between the churches. Liz, the only girl and the youngest by nearly a decade, would type her rap lyrics on the computer and print them and proffer shyly handouts to the assembled and slightly puzzled.

“Obviously you’re not gonna be a rapper doing that,” Alberto says, with a laugh. “You’re not gonna have the street credibility that people wanna see when you’re rapping off index cards. But they were real in tune with her abilities—‘You have the lyrics, you have skills, now it’s just a matter of memorizing.’ It took her a while to understand what we meant. They weren’t trying to tell her don’t rap. They were trying to mold her: This is the image you want.”

Alberto Acevedo is eight years older than Liz and the oldest of Antonio and Rosa’s three children, 34-year-old Robert being the middle child.

Alberto says he treated Liz like a peer, talking to her like an adult and exposing her to hip-hop and rap that was maybe beyond her years but not her maturity. Liz loved the storytelling of Tupac and Nas and became infatuated with and saw herself in female rappers Missy Elliott and Eve and Foxy Brown. Alberto and his friends also talked to her about politics and the world and war and race and explained why the cops seemed to get to other neighborhoods faster than theirs.

“It wasn’t the best of neighborhoods,” Alberto says of his block. “We would try to limit the time we would spend out on the corner. … The ’90s were a rough time. Drugs were the way that youths at that time saw their way out. Crack was huge back in the ’90s, especially in my neighborhood, and it depended on which corner you would go to. Everyone had their territory. One block, you would see cocaine. Another would sell crack. Another would sell weed, and they all kind of had their boundaries—but they also represented the neighborhood and who lived there.”

Part of the story Liz told at the café involved “shady” guys who may (or may not) have been selling drugs. Alberto, though, says he encouraged her to ask questions about the shady guys, the world, about anything, and she did.

“Why are we going to war? Why is this person being discriminated against? Is that right or wrong?” Alberto says. “We always tried to give her one point of view but also get her to remember that there’s always another side of the story, no matter how you see it. You may see it my way, you may see it your way, you may see it their way, but there’s multiple ways to look at something.”

As a fringe middle-schooler, Liz was writing about war and politics and race relations, plying a conspicuously vast vocabulary broadened by, Alberto says, a persistent-and-eclectic reading habit. It carried her into The Beacon School, a college preparatory high school a then-15-minute subway ride away near Lincoln Center, where she moved from rap to spoken-word poetry.

Abby Lublin was an English teacher at Beacon, a predominantly white and well-to-do 1,000-student school stuffed, at the time, inside a salvaged parking garage. The school has since moved. Lublin sponsored the poetry club: Live Poets. It met Thursdays on Lublin’s classroom couch. A group of eight or nine members formed the club’s core and heart. Liz, steeped in hip-hop, joined as a ninth-grader in 2002, recruited by Lublin.

“She came in and she had, well, you can call it swagger,” says Lublin, who moved to upstate New York in 2010. “A lot of her early poetry was pretty political and pretty observant of the world around her and very outward looking. Through her time at Live Poets and through building this small community of trust and vulnerability, she really started going more inward and more toward self and family and then that intersected with her political work and her political consciousness, and her power just exploded and grew with every piece that she shared and she wrote.”

Liz Acevedo, at the urging of Lublin, did her first poetry slam in February of her freshman year. She was 14 and on the stage at the venerable Nuyorican Poets Café, a community arts and cultural hotspot in the Lower East Side founded in the early 1970s. Acevedo was among the youngest poets in a citywide slam for high school kids. More than 400 students entered, and Acevedo finished in the top 10, she thinks, by being “angrier and bigger” than everyone else, compensating for what she now sees as less than honed writing. Acevedo, not surprisingly, winces at her juvenilia, but in it is the roux for her future work—the introspection and the politics and the quest for identity in alien places.

“So much of it is about cultural navigation and code-switching, both in language and culture,” Lublin says. “Liz is from a mostly Puerto Rican and Dominican neighborhood and went to a high school that was predominantly white—and not only in terms of student body but also culture. There are different ways to adapt to that. You either shrink and become invisible in that space or you adapt and try to emulate that or you, in Liz’s case, build an even stronger sense of who you are and try to use that as your source of power.”

Liz Acevedo has sat smiling and patient listening to me assail the mother in The Poet X. I have unloaded my feelings about the mother and her ever-compounding feats of tyranny and how I really wanted her to [REDACTED—FOR THE LAST TIME] at the end.

It’s been about an hour and a half in the window by the bike trail, and the blonde barista is ink-stamping the café logo on some to-go coffee cup koozies.

After my latest and probably most vehement upbraiding of Mami Batista, we’ve moved on. Acevedo is talking about her career and how she went from middle school teacher to college professor and how she did amateur slams and spoken-word poetry on the side before going pro and (seemingly) coming out of nowhere.

“What do you think of all this?” I say. “I won’t say it’s a bizarre career path, but when you think about what you want to be when you grow up, this is the kind of stuff you think about. Most people end up in a cubicle, but you made your own major and you wrote a novel with poems. I’m kind of jealous.”

“It’s not too late,” Acevedo says.

“Not that I have a traditional job, but yours is so much more romantic. Do you ever think about what you’ve been able to cobble together?”

She does not disagree that it’s a cobbling.

“I think it was a lot out of a single-mindedness on the kind of life I wanted to live and what I thought I would enjoy doing and always trusting the shift,” Acevedo says. “I’m in a place now where I know I have to cut back on how many events I do, and it’s because it’s too many and I’m no longer as happy as I was doing that. I don’t want to be on the road as much as I was. I had the book coming out—HarperCollins and I have a great relationship—and I’m sure there are going to be more books and so what I’m doing next has shifted. It’s more about Elizabeth Acevedo the Author, so when I’m brought in, it’s probably less performance, doing fewer poems, and it’s more talking about the book, talking about my process as a writer, and things are shifting, and I think I’m OK with following those shifts as long as I’m working with language.”

“The kind of life you wanted? What do you mean by that?”

“I don’t want to work 9-to-5s. I don’t like working early mornings. I don’t like having to be answerable to anybody but myself. I’m lucky to be at a point that if I don’t want to do a show or an event or a school visit, I don’t have to take it unless I want to take it. I’ve built my career so things are pretty flexible. I have a lot of ability to block out time for what’s important to me—and that’s not to say it’s easy. I think it’s easy to romanticize what this work is. A lot of people travel for work. Very few people travel to a different city every single day for three months, where you literally cannot build a rapport with the concierge at the hotel, where you don’t have a spot you can eat at again, where you don’t see a human that you know for three months straight.”

Sometimes she fidgets with the straw in the plastic cup of pink tea.

“You get on stage every single night and recite poems about things that have hurt you,” Acevedo says, “and then you listen to young people tell you what those poems mean to them and the hurts they have and then you carry that as if you were a social worker when you are not a social worker and that’s hard work. Clearly I’m not building houses or doing construction, but in terms of having to, on a daily basis, show up in the same way and be impressive—I still feel that pressure.”

“I never thought about it like that.”

“Everybody who sees me is probably seeing me for the first time, and I think I try to be mindful to not forget that, that every show is someone’s first show, even if I’ve been doing these poems for 10 years. But I don’t create albums, so it’s not like every year is a new album. It’s literally just phasing out certain poems, bringing in new poems. But there are certain things I’ve been doing and saying for a really long time that I still think need to be heard and I’m doing it and it becomes a routine. But—especially at 18, 19, 20, I don’t know, that’s a pretty impressionable age for a lot of folks who’ve never seen someone do this. A lot of schools in the middle of South Dakota or Wyoming or Texas, they’ve never seen a woman of color speak about race and gender in this way. I don’t take it lightly.”

“That sounds exhausting, not physically but emotionally. I never thought about this. I thought I did, but I didn’t really. Your poems, especially these”—I point to Beast Girl & Other Origin Myths on the table next to The Poet X—“are very introspective. You’re talking about heavy stuff and then to relive it every day on stage and have people react to it, I’m assuming, crying sometimes—you almost need to be a psychologist. Do you ever think of yourself as a therapist?”

“I try to be very clear that I’m not a therapist. I do a Q&A after every event, so sometimes people ask less about the craft, and it’s more about content, and people hear themselves in your story and then they want to share, potentially things they’ve never said. I’ve had to learn how to listen.”

I’m suddenly aware of how much I’ve talked about how her book made me feel.

“I’ve had to learn how to thank people for saying something,” Acevedo says, “and not feel like I have to have an answer for them and that my story may be a mirror for them, but that’s it. I’m not a therapist.”

It sounds as if people look to her for solace.

“I think the arts can really open folks up, and especially at particular ages when people are going through things that they have never been able to talk about, and a lot of them don’t want to go to college counseling or don’t know that they can or don’t know how, particularly if you’re talking about communities of color. I don’t want, you know, anyone to think these things. There’s a lot of taboo around mental health.

“When you get on stage and do work about your family and do work about being marginalized and someone feels that—”

She stops, exhales. Were her hair free to be coily, it would move softly.

“I mean,” Acevedo continues, “I’ve had students come up to me afterwards and share about sexual assault that they’ve never said to anyone, and I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know how to talk to a young woman about what may have happened and I can only encourage folks to keep talking and to find someone to talk with on a consistent basis that can help. I had people, particularly mothers—I have a lot of poems about my mother, my relationship with my mother. My novel is about a young woman and her mother, and I get a lot of questions about very personal, particular situations about young people and their moms and it’s like …”

“Like?”

“I don’t know.”

I think I could be more understanding of the mother.

⬤