Born in Haiti as Pascale Philantrope, Zoboi immigrated from Port-au-Prince with her mother at age four and grew up in Bushwick, Brooklyn, in the 1980s. The move was hard on Zoboi, who found Brooklyn to be lonely, as her family was in Haiti and her mother worked. She cites the move from Haiti to New York as one that defined her. Four years later, Zoboi returned to Haiti for a visit with her mother. When they tried to return to the United States, Zoboi was not allowed to return. Zoboi stayed in Haiti with relatives for three months while her mother worked to get her back. After her return, her teachers placed her in an English as a Second Language course when she was in the fifth grade, wrongly assuming that Zoboi couldn't speak English. This caused her to feel "invisible". She turned to poetry and writing as a way for her to be seen. Before becoming an author, Zoboi worked in at a newspaper and in a bookstore. Interested in writing, she took classes in creative writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and graduated with her MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults. Zoboi changed her first and last names after marrying her husband Joseph. She took his last name, Zoboi, for her name. Her first name, Ibi, comes from the Yoruba language and means "rebirth", which is close to the meaning of Pascale, is a name that relates to Easter.
Career
Zoboi began her writing career as an investigative reporter and worked among others with Octavia Butler. Zoboi is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop as well as a winner of the 2011 Gulliver Travel Grant. In 2018, Zoboi received the Americas Award for Children's and Young Adult Literature from the Library of Congress.' While working on her MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults, she was chosen as a finalist for the New Visions Award before publishing her debut novel. Through Kickstarter, Zoboi was able to fund the Daughters of Anacaona Writing Project, a creative writing workshop in Port-au-Prince. According to Zoboi, one of the reasons she started this workshop was to give Haitian girls a voice and ways to see themselves in literature. The project was named for the Taino queen Anacaona. The project helps both Haitian girls, as well as Caribbean girls. It began in 2009 and went until 2014.
Selected works
Prior to publishing her first novel, Zoboi wrote short stories including one story titled The Farming of Gods which was published in 2012 and features a setting of a post apocalyptic Haiti following the 2010 Haiti Earthquake. The Farming of Gods is an example of Afrofuturism and combines aspects of traditional Haitian belief systems with futuristic and dystopian concepts. Her debut novel American Street, about a Haitian teen whose mother gets detained when they first immigrate to America, explores magical realism, immigration, and voodou culture, all based on the author's on experiences as a Haitian-American immigrant. It was published by Balzer + Bray in 2017.American Street was chosen as a finalist for the National Book Award for Young Adult's Literarature in 2017. The novel is set in Detroit, Michigan because she wanted the story to be told according to her experiences in Bushwick in the 1980s. Zoboi edited the young adult anthology Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America, published in 2019 by Balzer + Bray. Black Enough received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist. Zoboi's 2018 novel Pride is a re-telling of Jane Austen's 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice, set in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. My Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich, Zoboi's 2019 middle-grade novel, is about Ebony-Grace, a girl who is sent from Alabama to help her grandfather in Harlem in the 1980s and is her first middle grade book. As a young black girl who enjoys the science-fiction worlds of Star Wars and Star Trek, Ebony-Grace is seen as an "ice cream sandwich" by her peers; brown on the outside, but white on the inside.
