Ibi Aanu Zoboi was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and is a graduate of the Clarion West Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. Her short story, “Old Flesh Song”, is published in the award-winning Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, a collection of African American speculative fiction. Ibi received an award from theWomen Writers of Haitian Descent for her short story “At the Shores of Dawn”, which was published in One?Respe! literary journal. She won a “Tricky Talker of the Year” an annual tall-tale contest presented by the Afrikan Folk Heritage Circle.
Her children’s fable, “Mama Kwanzaa & Her Seven Children”, was published in African Voices Magazine. She designed and taught a course on female archetypes in world mythology to the young women of the Sadie Nash Leadership Project where she also taught creative writing and leadership classes and she’s been a volunteer mentor with Girls Write Now, Inc. Ibi presented a paper entitled, “Oya’s Brood: Mythology and the African American Woman” for a symposium on Octavia Butler at the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College.
She is a recipient of a grant from the Brooklyn Arts Council for her original program, the Daughters of Anacaona Writing Project, partnering with local organizations Dwa Fanm, Inc. andHaiti Cultural Exchange in Brooklyn, and Fondasyon Felicite in Haiti to conduct a 3-day workshop with teen girls in Port-au-Prince. Ibi has completed a teen fantasy novel based on Haitian myth and folklore. Her short story “The Harem” is recently published in Haiti Noir, edited by Edwidge Danticat.
She’s a recent winner of the Gulliver Travel Grant given annually by the Speculative Literature Foundation and holds an MFA in Writng for Children & Young Adults at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Ibi lives in Brooklyn with her husband, visual artist and educator Joseph Zoboi, and their three young children.
Her debut novel, AMERICAN STREET, was published by Balzer + Bray, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers was a finalist for the National Book Award and has received five starred reviews. Under the same imprint, her latest YA novel, PRIDE, was released this Fall, and, BLACK ENOUGH, a collection of stories about what it’s like to be young and black in America, debuted in January of 2019. Her middle grade debut, MY LIFE AS AN ICE-CREAM SANDWICH was released in August, 2019 from Dutton/Penguin Books.
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