Punching the air book cover5/19/2023 As an art student and poet, Amal had a bright future ahead of him but that one fateful night upends his entire life. Punching The Air centres on Amal Shahid, a Black Muslim teenager who is convicted of a crime he didn’t commit – in this instance, assaulting a white boy during an altercation in a gentrifying neighbourhood – and sent to prison. The result is a powerful and emotional verse YA novel that speaks to generations of young people who’ve faced injustice because of the colour of their skin. Though Punching the Air isn’t Yusef’s story as it happened, in Zoboi’s own words, it pulls ‘from his experiences’. Just fifteen at the time of his conviction, Salaam served 6 years and 8 months in prison, before eventually being acquitted in 2002. Salaam is a member of the Exonerated Five, a group of Black and Latino boys who were falsely accused of assault and rape in 1989, a case that was recently depicted in Ava Duvernay’s Netflix series When They See Us. When Ibi Zoboi first met Yusef Salaam back in 1999, neither could have foreseen that twenty years later they’d be collaborating on a book together.
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