Akwaeke Emezi

About Akwaeke Emezi

Akwaeke Emezi was born on June 6, 1987, in Umuahia, Nigeria, to an Igbo Nigerian father and a Tamil Sri Lankan mother, and grew up moving between Nigeria and Bethel, a small town in New Jersey. They went on to earn a master's degree in public policy and nonprofit management from New York University and an MFA in creative fiction from Syracuse University. Emezi is non-binary and transgender and writes across genres—speculative fiction, memoir, poetry, and young adult fiction—often drawing on Igbo cosmology to reframe questions of embodiment, spirit, and identity that Western literary traditions tend to treat as separate.

Emezi's debut novel Freshwater (2018) drew wide critical attention for its portrayal of a protagonist whose selfhood is understood through Igbo spiritual concepts, and its success established Emezi as a distinctive voice in contemporary literary fiction. The Death of Vivek Oji (2020) became a New York Times bestseller, and their memoir Dear Senthuran (2021) extended their exploration of gender and spirit into nonfiction. In 2019, Emezi became the first openly non-binary transgender author longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction.

Pet and Its Challenges

Pet (2019), Emezi's first novel for young adults, imagines a city that believes it has eliminated monstrous violence, only to have a teenage girl summon a creature that insists otherwise. The book won the Stonewall Book Award and a Nommo Award and was a National Book Award finalist, and it introduced Emezi's speculative sensibility to a younger readership while centering a Black, transgender protagonist and a same-gender family without making either the story's central conflict.

That same matter-of-fact representation has made Pet a frequent target of challenges. Objections generally focus on its transgender and nonbinary characters, its depiction of a same-gender household, and its oblique treatment of abuse within a trusted family, with challengers arguing the content is unsuited to the book's intended age group. In this catalog, Emezi's books have been the subject of challenge records across 7 states and 19 districts, part of a broader pattern of scrutiny aimed at young adult titles with LGBTQ+ characters.