Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America

Ibi Zoboi, the editor of the collection Black Enough: Stories of Being Young and Black in America, is a Haitian-American young-adult author. Her works range in scope from Afrofuturism and magical realism to historical literature focused on Haiti and the urban United States. Her writing explores the concept of identity—as a Haitian, an immigrant, and an American—and what it means to belong for people of color. She remembers first turning to writing and poetry as a way to express herself and feel seen, as she was marginalized when first coming to the United States as a young girl.

As she explains in her introduction to the text, the hope of the collection is to explore the differing, nuanced lives of people of color. Her hope is that “Black Enough will encourage all Black teens to be their free, uninhibited selves without the constraints of being Black, too Black, or not Black enough. They will simply be enough just as they are” (xii). The stories explore teenage lives and the impact that their skin color, their families’ expectations, money or lack thereof, their sexuality, and more have on their identity—and the struggle to express that identity with the social constraints around them.