My Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich

In 2022, Ibi Zoboi published a biography of the 20th-century Black author Octavia E. Butler, Star Child. Like Ebony-Grace, Butler had a robust imagination and an interest in science fiction, publishing many famous stories and novels like Kindred (1979) and “Bloodchild” (1995). Though Butler’s work is more overtly political than Ebony-Grace’s narrative—her stories explicitly address issues like racism and Black slavery in the United States—they both have robust imaginations, or, as Granddaddy calls them, “imagination location.”

In My Life as an Ice-Cream Sandwich, Zoboi uses different mediums to convey Ebony-Grace’s story. There are comics, song lyrics, and, near the end of Chapter 17, a poem/story set in cascading type. Zoboi applies genre-mixing to her Butler biography, using poems, snippets from interviews, and prose to convey Butler’s story. Ebony-Grace doesn’t want to be a flavor, but if she had to be, she’d be one “made up of all the things in the Milky Way” (112). Zoboi applies Ebony-Grace’s wish to be many things to her Butler’s and Ebony-Grace’s books: They’re not only narratives in prose.

In 2017, Zoboi published American Street—a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.