Maplewood’s own Ibi Zoboi, award-winning author and educator and recipient of the 2022 Maplewood Literary Award, has earned another prestigious prize.
On January 22, the American Library Association announced that Nigeria Jones by Ibi Zoboi is the recipient of the Coretta Scott King Author Award. The news was announced at the 2024 Youth Media Awards ceremony during ALA’s Lib Learn X in Baltimore, MD.
Nigeria Jones — also a National Book Award Finalist — is a YA coming-of-age novel that “explores race, feminism and complicated family dynamics.” Kirkus Reviews called it a “superb story of a girl missing her mother and terrified of missing out on a life that she chooses for herself.”
Zoboi was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and currently lives in Maplewood with her husband and three children. She gained widespread attention as the co-author of the Walter Award-winning Punching the Air, with prison reform activist, Dr. Yusef Salaam of the Exonerated Five. Her debut picture book, The People Remember, also received a Coretta Scott King Book Honor Award. Other books by Zoboi include Star Child: a Biographical Constellation of Octavia Estelle Butler, and Okoye to the People: a Black Panther Novel, for Marvel.
