6/5/2023 0 Comments Punching the air bookSalaam mined his experiences to fuel the collaboration. Torn from his loving mother, close friends, and budding career as a poet and artist, Amal has to navigate a cold, cruel ecosystem on his own, as Salaam did at the young age of 15-and then he waits for the truth to emerge. The book opens on the day Amal is handed a guilty sentence following a playground fight gone awry. "The best way to talk about what Yusef calls 'the criminal system of injustice' was to create a fictional character that was inspired by him," Zoboi says. While Punching the Airdoesn't tell Salaam's specific story, he sees much of himself in Amal, the novel's brilliant 16-year-old narrator. The result of their literary "meet cute" is the powerful novel-in-verse Punching the Air, out September 1 from Balzer + Bray. Zoboi never got to write the profile about Salaam she had planned-but now, as the author of acclaimed YA books like American Street and Pride, she could use her specialty to tell his story in another format. Two decades after that first encounter, Zoboi and Salaam reconnected at a book festival, where Salaam was selling his self-published book of poems.
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