A major perk of my day job is that I get to interview talented artists and musicians when they come to campus for the Grum Project. Funded by a generous-yet-unnamed benefactor, the Grum Project allows Williston to bring in artists for mini-residencies or speaking events that otherwise would be out of our (financial) reach. The latest visit was from author/poet Elizabeth Acevedo, and I had a wonderful time chatting with her. Below is my story that appears here, plus two straight Q&A bits that I didn’t get to use in the story, but thought were cool anyway. Enjoy!
Williston students were treated to a special assembly on Friday, May 3, when Elizabeth Acevedo, a New York Times best-selling author and the Young People’s Poet Laureate, gave a reading and sat for a question-and-answer segment. Acevedo, who writes teen and adult novels, came to campus as part of our Grum Project Visiting Artist series.
Acevedo’s assembly kept the student body captivated from start to finish. She opened with several readings of her work, including passages from her award-winning debut book, The Poet X, which was taught in Williston classrooms this year.
“It’s really, really cool [that my book is being taught],” Acevedo said in an interview before the assembly. “As someone who was a teacher, I know how hard I worked to find texts that had a lot of literary merit, but also were engaging—books that young people would want to talk about and that would offer enough fodder for them to connect to or to push back against.”
After the reading, Acevedo sat for a question-and-answer segment moderated by Soleil Richardson ’24. Acevedo dove into subjects including how she finds inspiration for writing, the differences between poetry and prose, and who her favorite hip-hop artist is.
To close the assembly, three Williston Students—Zah Ewen ’24, Parker Brown ’25, and Alia Ghaoui ’27 each read a piece of their own poetry. The trio were selected after an open call for a poetry contest. Acevedo noted how special it was that she got to both read and be read to during the assembly.
“It’s exciting to have a poet you’ve read also listening to your work,” she said. “It’s an exchange, which I think feels really unique and important.”
Prior to the assembly, Acevedo stopped in to an AP Literature class to answer questions about her book and also signed the students’ copies of her book. As a writer whose books target teens, Acevedo said coming to a school or campus helps her keep connected to the people she’s writing for.
“Because I write for young people, it feels really important to me that I speak with them,” she said. “There’s so much about their thought process and what they feel, how they feel, and the kinds of questions they ask about a text that informs me about how they’re engaging with the world.”
The Grum Project Visiting Artist series is funded by the generosity of a school alumna. While the term “artist” naturally lends itself to the visual and performing arts, Department Chair Natania Hume said that each year, she collaborates with a different department on campus “to touch as many students as possible and not just the self-identified ‘arts’ students,” she said. “Clearly, this year’s partner was the English department, so I asked folks in the English Department for suggestions. Sarah Sawyer suggested Elizabeth Acevedo, who is a performing artist as well as a poet. The whole school read her book, so every student was engaged in her work even before she arrived! Acevedo’s work has a lot of overlap with theater, music, and lyrics so I thought she would be a great fit—and she was!”
Extras
Acevedo is as well-spoken as she is well-written. I’m running her full answer to the question she starts answering above (what it means to have your book taught), plus her answer to how her transition from young adult author to “full-blown novelist” is going.
Q: How cool is it to know that your works’ not only been widely recognized as being “good,” but that it’s being taught, also?
A: It’s really cool. I mean, it’s really, really cool. As someone who was a teacher and just knowing how hard I worked to find texts that was going to have a lot we could talk about and had a lot of literary meritt, but also was engaging, right? That young people would wanna talk about, there would be enough fodder for them to connect to or to push back against. Like, I know how hard it is to sustain lesson plans over the course of a text and how judicious people have to be when selecting, you know, their text. And so I’m always honored that a teacher or an English department or a school say this is a text we wanna spend a lot of time on. I don’t know that people realize how much it means to me because I’ve been in the position of trying to find the text that will bring the students in that I can also use, right, to teach the lessons. And, and they’re not always the same. Sometimes the popular books just don’t lend themselves to a classroom and vice versa. So to know maybe I wrote a thing that does both, it’s, yeah, it’s really impactful. It’s very, very cool.
Q: You’ve written a lot of stuff targeted towards teens and young adults, but now you’re dipping into writing for quote-unquote “adults”—ho’ws that been? What’s the process been like?
A: Oh, this is a great question. Um, it was a stretch. You know, I think it came very naturally to write that book, tonally. There were just—there was subject matter that I knew wasn’t gonna work for young people. I like to be really thoughtful about knowing that a book for teens is going to challenge just enough, but also is going to really hold them for the space that they are in, right? Even they might be exposed to a lot of different things around sex and drugs and whatever. I try to be really mindful of my books, of just how much of that I let seep in. I mostly do very much family stories and, and dynamics and how can families as a group work through dysfunction. But with my adult novel, it kind of is a little bit more no holds bar, right? I can be really expansive. I can tune into a different register of my voice and of my vocabulary and how I push language. And, you know, that book jumps around in time. It jumps around with six characters. It it jumps around with point of views. And so I was able to be, I think, experimental in a way.
A Whately Devil 