Ibi Zoboi

Ibi Zoboi: As my own mother was aging, she's telling me before I take this to my grave, here is something you should know. So the secrets are coming out. And as more and more secrets are revealed, I'm learning more about myself.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: You might describe a secret as just a story someone won't tell you. Maybe it's too embarrassing, too private, or too dangerous for you to hear. But there are larger ways too for a story to become a secret. It can be banned or burned. It can be erased just as a culture is erased, vanishing as its storytellers are disappeared.

Sometimes, a story becomes a secret just because we were too distracted to ask someone to tell it.

Ibi Zoboi: They were not listening to our elders where, you know, just put him in nursing homes. There's so much that we don't even know is lost. We don't know what we don't know, and we lost what we didn't even have.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Eby Zaboi is a National Book Award finalist and the best selling author of American Street, Pride, Starchild, and most recently, Skin. Her work blends folklore, futurism, and family legacy into something that feels part poetry, part protest, and part spell. In this episode, Eby opens up about the cost of secrets, including one family bombshell her mother waited thirty years to drop on her. She tells us about growing up in Bushwick, Brooklyn before the coffee shops moved in, writing soap opera fan fiction in marble notebooks, and getting to know America from Irish nuns who taught her how to sing Danny Boy, plus a transcendent experience at a New York voodoo ceremony. My name is Jordan Lloyd Bookie, and this is the reading culture, a show where we speak with diverse authors about ways to build a stronger culture of reading in our communities.

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Evie, you know I'm very excited about this conversation today. Let's get started with your immigration experience. And I don't know, like, do you

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: remember much about that experience?

Ibi Zoboi: I came here when I was four. I do remember Haiti at three and four. They come in bits and pieces, but I remember feeling loved and protected. There was always somebody around. It a whole community, it seemed.

And I remember the stark difference of leaving Haiti and coming to New York, the isolation, the loneliness, cold, dark. Where in Haiti, I remember my mother being around and in New York, my mother always working. Yeah. So I've described that shift as sort of science fiction y in that it did felt like I was coming to a different planet. Yeah.

The landscape is different. The weather, the climate is different. The people are different. And I always talk about the reason why my mother left is not the reasons the stereotypical reasons. My mother was a broadcast journalist, a news commentator on a radio station.

And as a young woman, what voice do you have? In what ways can you really share your opinions under a dictatorship? Because at that time, Haiti had a dictatorship. And that sort of freedom is why many people leave, And it's not always because of lack of food or poverty. It is a sort of artistic and intellectual freedom that they're seeking.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Definitely. I think, like, especially right now, a lot of people forget that, you know, are forgetting that in the story. And what about your dad? You're talking about your mom, but was he in the picture?

Ibi Zoboi: My father was a few decades older than my mother and was a married man with his own children. And my mother was young, a young beautiful woman. So that was not your typical relationship. And I think it was exploitative and a little bit emotionally abusive. I've written that in an essay about my father and who he was, a very wealthy and popular and famous man.

So in that sense, this is why I'm a writer because there are a lot of things I know about how I came to be, and there are a lot of things I don't know. And everything is tied into the politics of Haiti, the patriarchy under a dictatorship, what it means to be an upwardly mobile young woman in the seventies, what does feminism look like in the seventies, and what a single motherhood looked like for an immigrant woman. Mhmm. So when being asked about my childhood, I can't help but to make it political.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: I can imagine. Your mom also, like, thinking about her you said that, yes, she started to be not present as much when you're in New York, but that mother daughter bond and then to, like, leave home and all those things together. I mean, like, that closeness, you know, is really intense under any circumstance. Was that, like, always in the fabric of your relationship when you said it was very, like, political? Was she very, very open with you about everything from a young age?

Ibi Zoboi: No. No. She was not open, but I was intuitive. I think when you're like an on up child for a little bit, when you're kind of alone to yourself, you're figuring out what is going on with these grown ups. There are things happening.

There are things being said. No one is speaking to you directly. I was the kind of child who hid under the table and listened. As I'm telling you all these things, I'm realizing this is why I'm a writer. I was eavesdropping on the adults around me because no one was sharing these secrets with me.

And when I say secrets, there weren't anything salacious or anything like that. It was more about what was happening politically in Haiti. Yeah. People being disappeared under a dictatorship. These were the conversations that were being had.

And, of course, they're not gonna be talking to a five year old or an eight year old about these things. There were passionate conversations. There was laughter. There were jokes. There were stories and tall tales all around me.

And I listened to them because this was the only entertainment that I had. My mother wasn't very open with me, but she spoke freely to her peers, you know, to other family members. And this is where I got bits and pieces of my own story.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: While Eby's mother shared freely with her group of friends, women she built deep friendships with working together as nurses, she wasn't exactly as open with Eby. Some stories were left unspoken, and it wasn't until much later that Eby learned one of the most surprising truths about her own family.

Ibi Zoboi: Something that's weighing heavy on my mind is that I have a half sister who left Haiti a couple of years ago under the Biden program. And this half sister of mine, I spent my entire adult life up until I was 30 thinking that she was my childhood friend. And after the big earthquake in Haiti in 02/2010, there was a seven point o magnitude earthquake in Port Au Prince, Haiti that killed hundreds of thousands of Haitians. And, of course, we're all wondering, did we have any loved ones who perished? And my mother just reminded me, you know, your childhood friend is in Haiti.

And I'm like, oh my goodness, did she get hurt? And in that moment, she tells me she's really my half sister. And I discover I have a sister who's three months older than me. Three months. And when we saw each other, you know, and we have a childhood photo together and then I see her as an adult on Facebook, I'm like, oh, snap.

Yep. Yep. We're related. And she didn't know either, and that changed my entire life. So now she's in the state she managed to leave Haiti, and, we're wondering what her status is.

You know? Things are changing for migrants and people seeking asylum in this country, and I'm trying to unpack that. The way I do that is through writing.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: What a, like, incredible revelation, but, yeah, it's, like, tinged with this, like, sadness and joy, both. You know? Loss? Yeah. Loss.

Ibi Zoboi: A combination of loss and just discovery. You know? It's good to find out when you do find out, but then you remember all those times that you didn't know. What if I was allowed to have that relationship all throughout my childhood years, all throughout my teen years? I would have loved to have had a half sister my age that I could we could just have that bond through the toughest times of our lives.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: EB grew up in Bushwick, Brooklyn, though not the version that many people picture today. Long before it became the artsy, mostly white backdrop for shows like girls, it was a working class neighborhood with predominantly black and brown families. Ibi's mother was determined to give her the best education possible and worked very hard to send her to a nearby Catholic school.

Ibi Zoboi: I think for a lot of Haitians and in Latin American countries, there

Ibi Zoboi: are a lot

Ibi Zoboi: of Catholic schools on those islands. Sure. And Catholic schools are considered to be better.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: That must have been, like, a very different environment. So is that, like, a mostly all white environment at the time, or was it, like, pretty mixed in the school?

Ibi Zoboi: Yeah. The whole entire neighborhood is black and brown children. All the teachers are white, and they were beloved. They seemed to love and care about us. I still remember my grade teacher, missus Highland, who was very Irish, and she let us know every day that she was a proud Irish to the point where I know a lot of Irish songs, and I know what an Irish blarney is.

Oh, wow. And we celebrated all throughout March. It wasn't just Saint Patrick's Day. It was Saint Patrick's Month. Amazing.

And to the point where now I am infusing Irish mythology into a book that I'm

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Really? That's amazing.

Ibi Zoboi: Celtic mythology. And later on, I found out that Haitian mythology infuses Celtic mythology and Catholicism into its lore. These teachers taught us their culture.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Mhmm.

Ibi Zoboi: There were too many of us from different parts of The Caribbean to kind of pinpoint one thing, but you came into a classroom and if our teacher was Greek, we were all Greek. If they were Irish, we were all Irish.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: I really love this way that you're describing your education, and I think it's not at

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: all what I would have expected when

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: you describe the teachers. You know? Anyways, what were you like when you were in school growing up? What was your personality?

Ibi Zoboi: I was very introverted, very awkward, and very socially awkward, and I still am. And I'm thinking back on relationships, and there's a lot of conversation happening around loneliness and isolation and making friends as adults. Yeah. I have some friends that I've had for twenty five plus years, but making new friends right now is difficult because I have quirks and that can come off in, you know, a certain way if you don't know me very well. But Schweck was a very tough neighborhood, and the kids were a little tough.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: I can imagine. And, you know, especially as a Haitian immigrant. Right?

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: When you were feeling that kind of isolation as a kid, did you have another outlet? What was your outlet?

Ibi Zoboi: At the end of the school year when the notebooks weren't used, you know, those black and white marble notebooks. Yeah. Yeah. There were bunch of pages that were blank. I wrote stories, and I wrote about the kids in my classroom.

I wrote them as adults. Oh. Because at nine, 10, 11 years old, I was watching soap operas. And and I created my own soap operas. And just imagine, you know, all my friends or not friends in my neighborhood and in my school as ten years older.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: That's so good.

Ibi Zoboi: Twenty years older, who married who, who had a baby with who, who cheated on who. Oh my god. It was so good. Right? Yeah.

That's so good. Yeah. I did that for a majority of my childhood all the way up until high school to keep myself entertained and busy until I had to step out into the world as a teenager and go socialize.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: After high school, Ibi initially went to Hofstra University, but quickly found that it was not the right fit. Returning to Manhattan, she discovered that another part of her home city was in the thick of one of those perfect place, perfect time, perfect people moments for young black creatives like herself.

Ibi Zoboi: I had some of the worst times in college, not because of anything happening because I had a hard time adjusting to college life, time management, and just being out on my own. And I moved back home and went to CUNY, a city college, a public university, and I had the best time because I needed to be in a diverse classroom, not race, but in age and economic experience. I was in school taking classes with women in their thirties who had children,

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: and Oh, cool.

Ibi Zoboi: They shared different things. There's something about the City University of New York, that school system, that is very special because I got to be in Manhattan. I got to take the train every day. I got to explore the city. Mhmm.

Something I would not have been able to do on a college campus, and this is where I truly, truly grew as a person. There was a program called the Black and Puerto Rican studies department. And it sounds very weird now because it's like, why black and Puerto Rican of all? You know? But it was started by black students and Puerto Rican students in New York City who advocated for ethnic studies programs Yeah.

In the late sixties. That was a huge movement. It started in 1968. And by the time I started I was in college there in the late nineties, I I realized, wait, it was 30 years old only. By the time I was there, it was still called black and Puerto Rico studies department.

And my professors were former Black Panther Party members Wow. And SNCC members. A professor of mine had traveled with the late John Lewis to West Africa and had worked with him as a freedom writer coming out of Mississippi. I had activists as professors in the CUNY system. Audre Lorde went to Hunter College.

All these wonderful, like, poets Yeah. Were teaching in the City University of New York, and there was always a protest for something. I was in that.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Oh, really?

Ibi Zoboi: I was in that space. Yeah. And I it was electrifying. You know? I really evolved in that space and in New York was the spoken word movement.

And I remember when Erica Badu was performing for the time in New York City and Common was performing. In Queens, I was a few blocks up from where a tribe called Quest was. Yeah. And it was this sort of Afrocentric neo soul space that really was nurturing who I was to become as a writer. So that could have only happened by me going to school in the city.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: So you had, like, your great awakening. Absolutely. You've, like, found your people, it seems like.

Ibi Zoboi: Yeah. And everybody seemed to be reading. Everybody if you had a Che Guevara Yeah. T shirt on, you had a Franz Fanon paperback in your dirty backpack. It was what they called us.

And you had your army fatigue pants and your hoodie. Yeah. Like, I was never home because I was out in the streets doing something and reading. Yeah. There were the boyfriends that I had were reading books and highlighting and writing in the margins and just hanging out at somebody's apartment and just arguing what a politically hegemony is.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Yeah. You thought you had to, like, okay. I had to get here because this is where my people are.

Ibi Zoboi: I had to get here, and these weren't just black people either. You know? We were all from different backgrounds, but everybody was into Che Guevara and Mumia Abu Jamal Yeah. And fighting for the politically oppressed. And it was such a time, and I think that's what college was supposed to be about.

And then you add the city to it, you know, and you add music to it. Yeah. The music was reflecting who we are Yeah. At that time.

Ibi Zoboi: We are not a people of yesterday. Do they ask how many single seasons we have flowed from our beginnings till now? We shall point them to the proper beginning of their counting. On a clear night when the light of the moon has blighted the ancient woman and her seven children, on such a night, tell them to go alone into the world. There, have them count the one, then the seven, and after the seven, all the other stars visible to their eyes alone.

After that beginning, they will be ready for the sand. Let them seek the sea line. They will not have to ponder where to start. Have them count the sand. Let them count it grain from single grain.

And after they have reached the end of that counting, we shall not ask them to number the raindrops in the ocean. But with the wisdom of the aftermath, have them ask us again how many seasons have flowed by since our people were unborn. The air everywhere around us is poisoned with truncated tales of our origins that is also part of the wreckage of our people. What has been cast abroad is not a of our history even if its quality were truth. The people called our people are not the of our people, but the haze of this fouled world exists to wipe out knowledge of our way, the way.

These myths are here to keep us lost. The destroyer's easy prey.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: The book Eby read from is entitled 2,000 seasons by Aiyi Kwei Armagh, a Ghanaian writer who published the novel in the nineteen seventies. Eby encountered it in a college course called the African novel, where she studied stories not just of slavery, but of entire civilizations. Empires disrupted, identities fractured. 2,000 seasons is a sweeping litany of loss, of land, people, of culture, of memory. It unlocked for Eby a deeper understanding of the histories that shaped her and the ones that she never got to learn.

Ibi Zoboi: The thing I love about this book is the way in which he captures what has been lost. And there's no, like, enslavers or masters. There's the destroyed and the destroyers, the lost and the stolen, the thief. No. He doesn't use the word thief, but there's this idea of just it's not the bodies that were destroyed.

It's culture. Yeah. And it's a longing for, oh my goodness. What did we really lose in the process? And it's my favorite and still is my favorite book.

I write for children because I wanna be able to capture this idea in a 100 different ways through a 100 different books, and I'm working on it.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Yeah. It's really making me think about people pulling on those stories that kinda, like, loop through generations and just how that gets physically completely shut off and ended, destroyed.

Ibi Zoboi: Yeah. Once you stop, you'll forget it. If they're banning books now and then we're not listening to our elders, we're, you know, just put them in nursing homes. They're not in our homes. You know?

Extended family is not existing. Yeah. There's so much that we don't even know is lost. We don't know what we don't know, and we lost what we didn't even have. That course really opened my eyes to read the African novelists talking about the Transatlantic slave trade.

They're writing about decolonization. Their freedom movements was our freedom movements to learn about South Africa and anti apartheid movement. Yeah. Like, once you read because it's not in our textbooks. They're not teaching the kids that in school.

And right now, you're only seeing it maybe through a Marvel movie.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Right. Like like Wakanda.

Ibi Zoboi: Right. But how do you push back against that narrative to say, no. There were people who were fighting in the same way that, yes, you have kings. You had people who are corrupted and were greedy. Also, you have people who had no idea.

It's everywhere. Right? Yeah. Yeah. People who had no idea what they were sending you to.

Right. But you get this nuanced portrayal of what happened to us, and you read all the many books, the accounts of women in the eighteen hundreds at the turn of the century. So all this to say, I am trying to do this for children.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Yeah.

Ibi Zoboi: Just here here is your history.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: In college, Eby was searching for wise elders and for writers who saw the world the way she did. Writers who made space for magic, myth, and power without having to leave their culture behind. And then she found Octavia Butler.

Ibi Zoboi: My friends were fans, and it wasn't so much she as a person was not glamorous. You know? She was a tall black woman, spoke very slowly and intentionally, and had a deep voice, not like a rock star by all means in terms of presentation, but we loved how she thought about the world. We loved her mind. I was that sort of young person who sought out elders.

Like, in college, I'm like, let me go to the 60, 70 year olds. They

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: have Interesting.

Ibi Zoboi: More to say. And I think I'm now that I'm saying this, I'm like, it's probably because of missus Highland in the grade Yeah. Who was telling us about Irish Blarney's Yeah. In the nineteen thirties Ireland. And then I wanted more of that probably in college.

It's like at the older you were, the wiser you were, and you could tell me the truth. Right? You can tell me the truth about what is this world? Why is this happening? What happened to us?

Why are people like this? And I found that in the professors. My professors for this course had lived through the worst of colonization in the fifties and sixties.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: It's so interesting, you know, because, like, you're hearing all these stories that feel like I

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: don't know. I think of them

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: as being, ancient history, but it's not. Right? You're hearing these stories from your elders, your professors right there. So you're hearing those stories from them. And then when did that turn from hearing stories to wanting to create stories, especially for kids?

Ibi Zoboi: I didn't always wanted to write for children. Oh. I always wanted to write speculative fiction. Uh-huh. And the hard part of that is not from a western lens.

Even with skin, it's promoted as my fantasy debut. Yeah. And I think readers are expecting high fantasy. Right? Some dragons.

Yeah. They're expecting some of the tropes there.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Yeah.

Ibi Zoboi: And it's like, what is this? What is it? Poems? What? Brooklyn?

What is going on here? Yeah. The hard part of claiming those things is that there's an expectation. There's a norm. There's a standard already that I'm walking into.

So I studied with Butler in 02/2001, and it was at the Clarion West science fiction and fantasy writers workshop in Seattle. When I got into that workshop, was was very competitive and prestigious at the time, and I think it still is. It was the most diverse class they've ever had in its thirty plus year history. Wow. So I knew I wanted to write speculative fiction because I was a lover of mythology.

And that love of mythology came from exploring my own Haitian identity. I grew up hearing the worst things about Haitian Vodou, Wes Craven's the serpent and the rainbow, which was the feature film to be set in Haiti Oh, yeah. Was so dehumanizing. I did not grow up with Lugao stories, which is what they're called in Haiti. My mother, here she is in New York City.

She wasn't gonna sit down and tell me bedtime stories about Lugao. It's an urban landscape. She's reading I I remember she had Grey's Anatomy textbooks all around. And because she was studying nursing and chemistry textbooks, and we had Encyclopedia Britannica books. So that's all the books that were on my shelves in the Encyclopedia Britannica set.

Oh, yeah. You know what I'm talking about.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Right? We had a world book. Yeah.

Ibi Zoboi: We're right there under the television. Yeah. And these were my books. That was my reading. And alongside the stories of political upheaval in Haiti, what happened to whom, who's left behind, who made it to The United States, and the music, the food, all tell a story.

I wasn't really allowed to go play outside because for a lot of immigrant families outside is this scary thing. So I grew up being afraid of my own culture. And I keep bringing college into this conversation because it's four years of intense unlearning.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Yeah.

Ibi Zoboi: So I go to my very voodoo ceremony in Brooklyn. Mind is blown. I'm scared. I'm scared. I go with a friend and we're all in white.

You know, we're gonna have an experience. And it was so beautiful, so well orchestrated. It's theater. You know? Yeah.

It is ritual drama and so incredibly mundane at the same time. It's all about art's time here is very short. You better enjoy it. This is our one day. It's like carnival, letting go of the flesh, and it's embracing death and life at the same time.

It's beautiful symbolism if you understand the symbolism and not afraid of it. This is ritual. This is what all humans do. And a light bulb went off like, oh, wow. We're human.

We are beautifully human. And a long time ago, we figured out this is how we can orchestrate. This is how we create story around this thing that we have to do. Yeah.

Ibi Zoboi: We work hard. Life is hard,

Ibi Zoboi: and we have to honor this energy on this particular day so that we are all in sync and we call it a thing, you know, and we respect it. This is what our tradition is about. And who are they to bastardize it and call it evil? You do the same thing, and you call it something else.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Inspired by her voodoo experience, Eby wrote When the Star Saints Come Marching In, a short ghost story about gods descending to commune with ordinary people. It was imaginative, deeply personal, and exactly the kind of story she wanted to tell. But when she tried to sell it, she found that publishers were looking for something that fit more neatly into how they saw her. Her breakthrough came with American Street, a story that aligned more with the narrative they expected from her.

Ibi Zoboi: I was pigeonholed into having to write an immigrant story because I'm an immigrant. And I was also writing science fiction because I had the bright idea to bring the gods into space or something like that. You know?

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: With American Street, Eby officially stepped into the world of young people's literature, but success didn't necessarily mean belonging. The atmosphere of mainstream young adult fiction was a jarring switch from the radical imaginative literary circles she'd known.

Ibi Zoboi: I felt like I I was coming from a PhD program in mythological studies to a high school in Middle America. Wow. I'm shading right now. It was hard for me. There was a steep learning curve where I'm writing things that's appealing to the intellect, right, to the spirit.

I want to do the same in young adult space, but you are essentially selling to teenagers, you know, who, you know, are looking to other teenagers as to what they want. And I'm like, let me find that deeply soulful reader, you know, who will understand what I'm doing and how could I move through the other stuff to get that one reader. Yeah. I'm in Brooklyn. I'm raising young children.

And I sell my You book, which, you know, it's an immigrant narrative. And I'm saying something about my own culture, Haitian Vodou, the immigrant story. And I step into the world, and I remember one of the things joining, a debut group. And the debut group is to support debut writers for a certain number of years, and there's so much that was asked of us. And the fear was that if I don't do this, I won't stay in because it took so much to get in.

I feel like it's so fleeting. It could slip through my fingers. I have more stories to tell. If I have to do this song and dance, I'm gonna do it. But it was like, I'm so not myself right now.

And it took me a couple of years to realize, wait. I don't have to do

Ibi Zoboi: this. Yeah.

Ibi Zoboi: You know? And being around with the right people to tell me, no. You don't have to do this. You know? This is why this is happening.

This is why others do it. You have to find out who you are in this space so that you can push back against the zychist. And it's the same thing now. It's like there are things happening online. There are things happening in my industry.

In what ways do I participate and in what ways do I step back and self isolate and be okay with that loneliness and just claiming yourself in the space and not have to fall privy to what you should be doing in order to be successful, I'm realizing. It's like, oh, this is why I had a hard time because I pushed back against the mainstream in high school.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Yeah.

Ibi Zoboi: I pushed back against mainstream in college. Even in motherhood, I pushed back against the mainstream. All my children were born at home. And I did one of the what did they call it? They called it something back then where you you carried them.

I carried my babies around.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Oh, yeah. Like, when you're wearing baby wearing.

Ibi Zoboi: Yeah. Yeah. Baby wearing, they were close. You know? Yeah.

These ways I push back against the norm. And as a writer, as a published author, there's a norm that I'm pushing back against, and it was hard to name and figure out and always feeling uneasy about the space I was occupying. And I'm like, oh, this is the norm. I know what I have to do. I gotta push back.

You know? All these things just run through my mind as an author in this space daily. How do I push back against the norm to be comfortable in my own skin?

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: At every phase of her life, Abe has carried more than just her own voice. Behind her are the women who came before, whose stories, silences, and strength still shape the way she writes.

Ibi Zoboi: The matriarch, the matrilineal, the women who came before me, I feel very strongly. When I'm writing, I feel like I'm really channeling their stories or they're somewhere behind me or above me or around me whispering to me, I want my story to be told. This is my story. Can you tell my story? There's no way I could be a writer without hearing those voices or intuiting those voices around me.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Yeah. Do you feel like more and more that is what's happening? That's like what's coming to fruition. Their stories are emerging.

Ibi Zoboi: Absolutely. As my own mother is aging, she is speaking more. She's telling me stories I've never heard. I'm in my forties. She's in her seventies, and I'm like, you never told me this.

And there's something about aging that that they're probably just remembering something and telling you before I take this to my grave, here is something you should know. So the secrets are coming out. And as more and more secrets are revealed, I'm learning more about myself, more about them. And as a writer, as a storyteller, I'm saying this is a great story. Sometimes it's not so great to think that way, but I needed to write through this secret that you kept from me.

And this is how the stories are coming now as I'm getting older. I wanna write more mature, sophisticated, nuanced, profound stories because secrets, old secrets are being revealed to me by my mother and the women in my family.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: Phoebe's reading challenge, Haitian creations, shines a light on stories of migration, memory, and identity. It's a collection that celebrates generation voices and the rich complex experiences of newcomers finding their place.

Ibi Zoboi: When I do school visits for American Street, I do a little exercise at the beginning where I ask the audience. Sometimes it's hundreds of students and teachers. Sometimes it's a very small classroom. And I just go around and I just ask three questions and I tell them, raise your hands if you were born in a different country. I get some hands up.

Raise your hands if you have at least one parent who was born in another country. More hands go up. By the time I get to grandparents, raise your hand if you have at least one grandparent born in different country. I get so many hands raised and those are always surprising no matter what the demographic is. So I tell those young people, yes, there are communities where they don't know where their parents come from, like the native Americans or black Americans, African Americans who have family who've been here for centuries and they came under different circumstances.

But for the most part, we have a comers or newcomers experience in our lineage and it's so important to read about those experiences. So my reading challenge is to read about those experiences. I would say skin and American street, probably my entire body of work. Classics, if you have not read them, House on Mango Street, Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat, Dear Haiti, Love Ellen by the Maulit sisters, Maike and Maritza Maulit. I'm going to say Ben Philippe.

Two books by Ben Philippe. The names escape me now, but there's one I would suggest over the other. And I have more. I have more. But basically, newcomers experiences even if they're not from The Caribbean.

I want to read more about gen or immigrant experiences from places we wouldn't think of, like Europe, either or Eastern Europe, Eastern Africa, West Africa, more of those stories.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: You can find EB's reading challenge and all past reading challenges at the readingculturepod.com. And this week's beanstack featured librarian is once again William Shaller the librarian at Hoffman Middle School in Houston Texas This time, William shares how a surprise resurgence of twilight, side note, my daughter just finished breaking dawn, led to an unforgettable moment of joy and connection at his school library.

WIlliam Schaller: So with the evolution of book talk and things that are renaissanceing, Twilight in my library has really become I was like, oh, I don't need to reorder that. That's so twenty years ago. But the readers are, like, watching it on their phone and they're like, mister, where is your vampire romance section? I'm like, what do you mean vampire romance section? They're like, we need Twilight.

And I'm like, Twilight? Like, these are 12 and 13 year olds and they're like, we're obsessed. I had books three and four, but not one and two. So we special ordered them. They came in.

We Amazon Primed them so they could get here because it was just like the energy. They wanted this vampire romance. So it came here. We got them. And it was during lunchtime.

So I went in the cafeteria, and we usually call, like, oh, so and so is going home for the day, but I called them up for their books. And they started cheering, and they went back to their booth because they were sitting we have, like, the regular sitting with the sides have the booths. And they're doing a whole photoshoot with their books, and they have the new twilight books. I'm like, these are not new, but I'm so happy that we made your day, your week with these twilight stories, and now you have one, two, and the rest of the series are in the library for you, and you can keep these and cherish them forever. It was a whole group.

But, yeah, it's just getting those books in the hands of kids that want them. The smiles were contagious. It was just a lot of good book energy.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey: This has been the reading culture, and you've been listening to my conversation with Eby Zaboi. Again, I'm your host, Jordan Lloyd Bookie, and currently, I'm reading other words for home by Jasmine Warga and the year of magical thinking by Joan Didion. If you enjoyed today's episode, please take just one minute to give us five stars on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen. Your reviews really help us, and they help get the show recommend to others. So thank you for taking the time to do it.

This episode was produced by Mel Webb and Lower Street Media and script edited by Josiah Lamberto Egan. To learn more about how you can help grow your community's reading culture, please check out all of our resources at beanstack.com. And, of course, remember to sign up for our newsletter at the readingculturepod.com forward slash newsletter for special offers and bonus content. Thanks for listening, and keep reading.