![]() ![]() That book became the co-authored Punching the Air (Balzer & Bray 2020) the much-decorated best-selling novel-in-verse, about Amal, using some of the poetry Yusef had written while in prison along with the words of master poet, Zoboi. A few years ago, she asked Yusef to collaborate on a book. Since their first meeting, Haitian-American Ibi Zoboi had become the acclaimed author of American Street, Pride, and others. Yusef had “freed his mind” while serving a sentence for a crime he hadn’t committed, by writing poetry in prison. Yusef Salaam was one of the five Black teenaged boys who were wrongfully convicted of murder in Central Park a decade earlier-a story documented in Ken Burns’ The Central Park Five. Ibi Zoboi met Yusef Salaam in an African literature course at Hunter College taught by Dr. ![]()
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