Ibi Zoboi

From following the straight-and-narrow expectations of her Haitian background to changing her name and becoming an accomplished author, Ibi Zoboi’s story is one of constant reinvention. Though marriage and raising her three kids makes it difficult to pursue a literary career, Zoboi believes motherhood has boosted her creativity and determination. She walks mater mea through her many transformations, including the one that changed her life the most: Becoming a mother.

Speculative fiction writer Ibi Zoboi (pronounced e-bee za-boy) has a life that closely echoes the radical and personal transformations seen in her favorite genre: She changed her name in college; had an intense, whirlwind courtship with painter Joseph Zoboi; became a mother of three children before she was 30 years old; and has garnered a number of accolades for her writing, which melds folklore, mythology, and fantasy.

While Zoboi often uses the word “magical” to describe important moments and milestones, serendipity is only part of her story.

Ibi Zoboi was born Pascale Philantrope, the eldest daughter of a Haitian single mother who immigrated to New York in the 1980s. Now 36, Zoboi says that growing up in New York was illuminating, but not always easy. Inside her community, some transplants’ views on respectability (think starched, white dresses and all-white schools) made it difficult to fit in.

“There was a group of Haitians that didn’t want to associate with poverty, whether that meant wearing certain kinds of clothes or leaving your hair all nappy,” she recalls. “[So] I understand my mother better now. She left one country and was paying for Catholic school, and there I was looking like a peasant” in flowing, patterned skirts and an afro.

After high school, Ibi Zoboi enrolled in Hofstra University on Long Island and initially traveled along what she calls the “traditional, straight-and-narrow” route for black women at the time—she even considered pledging a historically black sorority. However, after attending her first spoken word event, Zoboi decided to transfer to Hunter College after her sophomore year. She’d heard the campus housed an organization focused on black women of the African diaspora called Daughters of Africa. The idea of sisterhood appealed to Zoboi’s changing aesthetic, which was less ‘90s R&B and hip-hop (“weaves and nails,” she says playfully) and more neo-soul.

“Being around other highly-literate, black college folks really motivated me,” Ibi Zoboi says. “All of a sudden I was frequenting poetry places and watching people walk up to mics to express themselves. Looking back, I realize I was always that kind of person; I just never saw an example of it because I went to a predominantly white high school. There was no way to see the range of black teenage expression.”

Still, changing a look is not the same thing as changing a mentality. Ibi Zoboi began reading canonical black authors like Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni. She explored the works of African-American playwrights and learned the history of the Black Arts Movement, and integrated those ideas into her evolving look. “I understood that there’s a reason I’m attracted to certain patterns and color combinations, and how I put myself together,” she says. “It comes from ancestral memory. I started with what I wore and how I wore my hair, but I began to see it as a political statement — like I was being defiant.” Her mother’s reaction?

“I still don’t think she gets it,” the writer says, especially of her name change. “She thinks I’m dealing with some psychological trauma that she blames herself for, but it doesn’t come from pain at all.”

In fact, Zoboi’s self-baptism appears to have come from a sense of hope and excitement that continues to motivate her. The name “Ibi,” Yoruba for “rebirth,” may seem entirely divorced from Zoboi’s francophone Caribbean roots, but it actually pays homage to Easter, the holiday she was named after. Creatively, Zoboi believed she was tapping into a tradition that other writers have pursued, from the aforementioned Shange (Paulette Williams), to Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), to Dr. Marimba Ani (born Dona Richards).

Ibi Zoboi initially adopted the pseudonym when writing pieces that seemed too controversial to be connected to her everyday work, but as she continued to write and perform her own poetry, Ibi seemed an apt, permanent name. Small poems became long poems, long poems became short stories, short stories became novels, and the “weirdness” of the spoken word movement where people wrote about the universe and planets infected her writing, leading her to the world of speculative fiction.

After graduating from college, Zoboi briefly held a position as a news editor at a local Queens newspaper, but quickly realized the corporate world wasn’t for her. She later attended the six-week Clarion West science-fiction program in 2001 and met her hero, science-fiction writer Octavia Butler. 

Ibi Zoboi was engaged to her husband at the time and, somewhat paradoxically, the closer she came to working on her art full-time, the more quickly family life unfolded. The two married that year, had their first child, Abadai, in 2002, their second daughter, Bahati, in 2004, and a son, Zuberi, three years later. “After that,” Zoboi says, “my writing slowed down.”

“I think I’d be lollygagging without children, but I would definitely be more prolific if I only had one,” she explains. “But I don’t regret it. Right now, I’m in a place where I have more gumption because I’m determined. I feel like I’ve gained wisdom and my writing is stronger—I just have to sit down and do it.”

Ibi Zoboi works in her home office or dining room, which is outfitted with shelves of fantasy novels, historical texts, and Joseph’s large-scale paintings. For a more structured setting, she attended the weeklong VONA (Voices of Our Nation) workshop at the University of California at Berkeley, and later enrolled in a low-residency MFA program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. With three children and a household to help run, finding time to stay on top of her deadlines can be difficult. But Zoboi cites Joseph’s “tremendous” help as a mitigating factor for her load, and her status as a black woman writer as a motivating one.

“A conversation is happening about the lack of black authors in children’s books,” she says. “There’s a boom in Young Adult fiction right now, but I’m one of only two black women in my program out of 100 people. Publishing is probably nothing compared to whatever hoops you have to jump through to secure something like academic tenure, but it’s especially difficult when you’re a black mother. There are a lot of doors slamming in your face.”

While other women might go into self-publishing, Zoboi chooses to bang on as many doors as possible. Since enrolling in the MFA program, she finished her first novel and is currently polishing it, and other stories, in workshop. For Ibi Zoboi, writing imaginative tales from a black perspective isn’t just about achieving a personal dream; it’s about amplifying her children’s sense of wonder.

“My work is one more story with a little brown girl who has superpowers. I don’t see much of that on shelves, so I have to give it a chance,” Ibi Zoboi says. “I really believe in the power of storytelling and the oral tradition. Mythology grounds us as people, and I want black children to see themselves as part of positive folktales where they can be vulnerable, but empowered. I need my children to see the world as a magical place.”