About this item
"Unflinchingly irreverent, laugh-out-loud funny, and heartbreakingly honest." - Elizabeth Acevedo, National Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author of The Poet XIn the vein of powerful reads like The Hate U Give and Girl in Pieces, comes poet Morgan Parker's pitch-perfect novel about a black teenage girl searching for her identity when the world around her views her depression as a lack of faith and blackness as something to be politely ignored.Trapped in sunny, stifling, small-town suburbia, seventeen-year-old Morgan knows why she's in therapy. She can't count the number of times she's been the only non-white person at the sleepover, been teased for her "weird" outfits, and been told she's not "really" black. Also, she's spent most of her summer crying in bed. So there's that, too.Lately, it feels like the whole world is listening to the same terrible track on repeat--and it's telling them how to feel, who to vote for, what to believe. Morgan wonders, when can she turn this song off and begin living for herself?Loosely based on her own teenage life and diaries, this incredible debut by award-winning poet Morgan Parker will make readers stand up and cheer for a girl brave enough to live life on her own terms--and for themselves."Morgan Parker put THIS song on--and I hope it never turns off." - Nic Stone, New York Times bestselling author of Dear Martin and Odd One Out"A triumphant first impression in the YA space." - Entertainment Weekly"An incredibly heartfelt, deep story about a girl's coming of age." - Refinery29
About the Author
Morgan Parker is the author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé (Tin House Books 2017) , Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night (Switchback Books 2015) , and the forthcoming poetry collection Magical Negro (Tin House, 2/5/19) . Her debut young adult novel Who Put This Song On? is forthcoming from Delacorte Press in late 2019, and her debut book of nonfiction will be released in 2020 by One World. Parker received her Bachelors in Anthropology and Creative Writing from Columbia University and her MFA in Poetry from NYU. Her poetry and essays have been published and anthologized in numerous publications, including The Paris Review, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, Best American Poetry 2016, The New York Times, and The Nation. Parker is the recipient of a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a 2016 Pushcart Prize, and a Cave Canem graduate fellow. She is the creator and host of Reparations, Live! at the Ace Hotel. With Tommy Pico, she co-curates the Poets With Attitude (PWA) reading series, and with Angel Nafis, she is The Other Black Girl Collective. She is a Sagittarius, and she lives in Los Angeles.
