Zetta Elliott - Ellen's Post

**Zetta Elliott**

**Biographical Information**

Zetta Elliott is a Black feminist playwright, poet and author of books for children, young adults, and adults, as well as scholarly essays. She was born in 1972 in Canada and immigrated to the U.S. in 1994 to live in Brooklyn New York, NY. She has a PhD in American Studies from New York University and currently lives in Chicago, IL. She has an independent publishing label called Rosetta Press. Throughout her career as a scholar and writer, she has remained deeply committed to social justice for Black and other communities and centering Black voices. Zetta is actually short for Rosetta, which is her middle name, after her grandmother.[1]

**Themes**

***Centering Blackness and Black Youth***

Elliott's work always positions Black children and youth as the heroes of her books and poems and portrays them in ways that neither hide nor apologize for their Blackness. Black community and Black joy and healing are also very important related aspects featured in Elliott's work.

***Magic and Technology as Black Empowerment***

Much of Elliot's work could fall into the genres of science fiction or speculative fiction. Technology and magic feature strongly in her stories as liberatory tools used by Black youths to design alternate universes in which "they are heroic, empowered, and able to demand the justice that remains so elusive in this world."[2]

***Social Forces at Work***

Elliott does not separate her characters or her stories from the real social contexts of U.S. life. Generally set in urban contexts, her work acknowledges the complexities of the social forces that act upon communities and individuals in racialized and gendered ways and the complexities of those communities' responses to social forces. The problems that her characters face are always contextualized within these complexities. Elliott also presents the tensions and contradictions that exist within communities in nuanced, sensitive ways.

**Writing Style**

Elliott uses imaginative, descriptive language to create the worlds of her characters, presenting details and backstories to help build layers of characters' identities. She also uses dialogue unsparingly to let us hear the voices of her diverse characters, incorporating various forms of linguistic expression that weave easily between dominant and community dialects.

In her picture books, Elliot uses language and vocabulary accessible to young readers. However, these books are also designed to appeal to older readers who may not yet able to access some of the language in many books written for their age group but for whom much of the content of more accessible books feels too immature.

**Representative Works**

Elliott's picture book, *Bird*, has received much attention and has won several awards, including the Honor Award in Lee & Low Books' New Voices Contest and the Paterson Prize for Books for Young Readers. It features a young boy who uses art to make sense of and cope with death and drug addiction in his family. She is also well-known for *Dragons in a Bag*, a middle grades novel about a boy who makes his way through time in Brooklyn, New York to help a witch to save her dragons. This book was named a Notable Children's Book by the Association for Library Service to Children and is part of a 3-part series. Her publishing label, Rosetta Press, features lesser-known but equally excellent books, including the *City Kids* fantasy fiction series for elementary-aged children. Her most recent publication is a 2021 picture book entitled, *A Place Inside of Me: A Poem to Heal the Heart*, illustrated by Noa Denmon. It is intended to help young people to cope with the trauma of police brutality through protest and healing. It is presented through the emotions of a young Black boy who has experienced the death of a friend at the hands of police (see her read-aloud of this book).

**Criticism**

Zetta Elliott's books have not received overt public criticism. However, there is a certain criticism implicit in the works that have not been published or have not received awards. She (and many others) attribute this to publishers' and reviewers' lack of interest in work that does not cater to white interests. Elliott writes and speaks prolifically on the overrepresentation of white characters and authors in children's and young adult's literature (see her essay on Policing Protest in Children's Literature), and she attempts to change this state of literature through her advocacy and her own contributions to this field of literature as a Black author.

**References**

https://www.zettaelliott.com/books/kids/

https://www.hbook.com/story/decolonizing-imagination

https://zettaelliott.wordpress.com/about-me/

https://booksforlittles.com/a-place-inside-of-me/

https://aalbc.com/blog/index.php/2016/02/25/prepare-kids-world-doesnt-exist/

https://www.hbook.com/story/the-writers-page-at-the-mercy-or-whim-of-others-policing-protest-in-childrens-publishing

[1] https://www.teachingbooks.net/pronounce.cgi?aid=10016

[2] https://aalbc.com/blog/index.php/2016/02/25/prepare-kids-world-doesnt-exist/, paragraph 6