num_pages: 400
description: From award-winning bestselling author Ibi Zoboi and prison reform activist Yusef Salaam of the Exonerated Five comes a powerful YA novel in verse about a boy who is wrongfully incarcerated. Perfect for fans of Jason Reynolds Walter Dean Myers and Elizabeth Acevedo. The story that I thoughtwas my lifedidnt start on the dayI was born Amal Shahid has always been an artist and a poet. But even in a diverse art school hes seen as disruptive and unmotivated by a biased system. Then one fateful night an altercation in a gentrifying neighborhood escalates into tragedy. Boys just being boys turns out to be true only when those boys are white. The story that I thinkwill be my life starts todaySuddenly at just sixteen years old Amals bright future is upended: he is convicted of a crime he didnt commit and sent to prison. Despair and rage almost sink him until he turns to the refuge of his words his art. This never should have been his story. But can he change it? With spellbinding lyricism award-winning author Ibi Zoboi and prison reform activist Yusef Salaam tell a moving and deeply profound story about how one boy is able to maintain his humanity and fight for the truth in a system designed to strip him of both.
language: English
title: Punching the Air
publisher: Balzer + Bray