Elizabeth Acevedo will publish her first novel for adults in 2023.
Multi-decorated author Elizabeth Acevedo is set to publish her first novel for adults in 2023. The currently untitled novel centers on a Dominican American family as they organize a wake for Rosa, a beloved matriarch who is still alive. (Rosa decides she wants the wake to take place while she is still living.)
The novel will be published in English by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, and simultaneously in Spanish by HarperCollins Español.
In an official press release, Acevedo said, “This novel has been humming underneath my skin for close to a decade and I’m delighted to share it with the world. Of all the places that could have helped usher it into being, it feels auspicious the manuscript landed in the careful hands of Ecco and my publishing family at HarperCollins. ¡Prepárense! This book is going from soft hum to full-throated chorus.”
Acevedo took the children’s literary world by storm with her debut YA novel, The Poet X (2008). The book won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, the Pura Belpré Award, the Carnegie medal, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, and the Walter Award. The New York Times bestseller follows Xiomara Batista, an Afro-Latina teenager from Harlem who joins her school’s slam poetry club.
Her latest YA novel, Clap When You Land (2020), is told in verse and spotlights two sisters who discover they have the same father after he dies in a plane crash. In an interview with NPR, Acevedo said of the novel, “I don’t imagine I’ll ever write a book for young people that doesn’t include an intergenerational theme—for me that was such a big part of growing up. And I think literature that is contemplating the family, you need the parents coming in and they can’t be perfect.”
Considering her impressive track record, this new book will probably exhibit the same brilliant blending of poetic narrative and emotional reckoning that pulses throughout Acevedo’s previous works. 2023 can’t come fast enough!
[via Kirkus]
