With the Fire on High Study Guide

Elizabeth Acevedo was born in New York to Dominican parents. She’s the youngest child and only girl. At age 14, Acevedo participated in one of her first slam poetry events at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and went on to perform at a number of open mic events around the city. She later earned a BA in performing arts from George Washington University and an MFA from the University of Maryland. Since graduating, she’s taught poetry to teens in a variety of settings, as well as eighth grade English through the Teach for America program. The Poet X was her first novel, and part of her inspiration for writing it was spending time with students who didn’t see themselves reflected in classic literature or in novels commonly taught in schools. All of her published works have won numerous awards and she’s also been recognized for her spoken word poetry. She lives in Washington D.C. with her husband.

It’s worth keeping in mind that Emoni, as a teen mother who also graduates high school and is bound for college in the fall, is the exception among American teen mothers rather than the norm. While her racial identity (as Black and Latinx) and her family’s low income are factors that the CDC has found can contribute to higher rates of teen pregnancy, the CDC has also found that only about 50 percent of girls who have a child while in high school go on to graduate, compared to 90 percent of their peers who don’t become parents. Since the 1990s, teen pregnancy rates have been decreasing in the U.S., something the CDC and other research organizations attribute to more teens choosing to delay sexual activity, increasing access to birth control, and evidence-based sex ed programs (in states and counties that don’t implement evidenced-based sex education programs, teen pregnancy rates tend to be higher). With the Fire On High also highlights the racial and ethnic makeup of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which has the second-largest Puerto Rican population of any U.S. city. As Emoni notes, while Black, Hispanic, and Latinx neighborhoods in Philadelphia tend to have historically higher crime rates, communities are robust, close-knit, and thriving. Indeed, Puerto Rican people who live in Philadelphia tend to be more likely to be solidly middle-class than Puerto Ricans living elsewhere in the U.S.

Acevedo cites the Dominican author Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) as a major influence on her writing, as well as Jacqueline Woodson’s 2014 verse novel Brown Girl Dreaming. With the Fire On High is one of several contemporary novels that explores unplanned pregnancies, particularly among teens. Angie Thomas’s Concrete Rose is a prequel to her hit 2017 novel, The Hate U Give; it follows The Hate U Give’s protagonist, Starr’s, 17-year-old dad as he balances new (and impending) parenthood and finishing up high school. How To Love by Katie Cotugno is another young adult novel that follows a teen’s choice to keep her pregnancy and parent her baby. Various other novels, including Unpregnant by Jenni Hendriks and Ted Caplan, You Don’t Know Me But I Know You by Rebecca Barrow, and Girls Like Us by Randy Pink, explore abortion and adoption. Food, cooking, and baking appear in various forms in many young adult or middle grade novels, ranging from the more serious like With the Fire On High to the whimsical. A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher takes place in a magical world where the young protagonist, a witch, has a familiar that takes the form of a sourdough starter; while in Jenny Han’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, baking elaborate treats is protagonist Lara Jean’s preferred relaxing hobby. Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel and Chocolat by Joanne Harris are intended for adult readers, but they treat food with a similar almost-magical tone as Emoni’s food in With the Fire On High.