Elizabeth Acevedo, the author of the multi-award-winning The Poet X and Clap When You Land, is also a National Poetry Slam Champion. Inheritance, her most famously performed poem, is here set in print, enhanced with stupendous art by author/illustrator Andrea Pippins (Young, Gifted and Black). Hair--and how it holds ancestry, power, identity--is the subject of this glorious collaboration.
"Some people tell me/ to 'fix' my hair./ And by fix, they mean/ straighten;/ they mean whiten," Acevedo opens. "But how do you fix/ this shipwrecked/ history of hair" when her tresses tie her to "African cousins/ in ship bellies"? And yet too many generations have been "finding ways to erase [the ancestors]... to iron them out of our hair." Acevedo's wild curls are her antecedents, even as she points to her own Dominican community for doing "the best hair" by washing, setting and flattening "the spring in any lock." This prowess, Acevedo clarifies, is akin to being "the best at/ swallowing amnesia/ in a cup of morir soñano." Hair might even stifle love because to "date a/ Black man" is "two times the trouble," a possible threat to the future of "your daughter's hair." Acevedo will have none of that: "all [she] can reply is,/ YOU CAN'T/ FIX WHAT/ WAS NEVER/ BROKEN."
Poet and artist synchronously showcase pride, tenacity and self-love through powerful verse and vibrant illustrations. Pippins's dynamic lettering includes curly-qs, bolds and varying sizes, proving especially adept at amplifying Acevedo's resonating text. The dynamic duo's empowering energy inspires affirmation of ancestral resilience and acts as a rebel yell against continued erasure. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon