Punching the Air

Amal Shahid is sixteen, an artist and a poet at a diverse art school. Teachers there still read him as disruptive and unmotivated, a label he feels comes from a biased system rather than from anything he has done.

One night, an altercation in a gentrifying neighborhood escalates into tragedy. The excuse of boys just being boys holds only when the boys are white, and Amal is convicted of a crime he did not commit. He is sent to prison, and the future he had been building is gone.

Inside, despair and rage nearly pull him under. He turns to his words and his art as a refuge, and they become the way he holds on to who he is. The question driving the book is whether a boy who never should have had this story can change it.

The book is a young adult novel co-written by Ibi Zoboi and prison reform activist Yusef Salaam. It is told from Amal's point of view, with a focus on poetry and art, and the tone is serious and emotional. It follows his fight to keep his humanity and to press for the truth inside a system that works against both.