Every Body Looking is a novel of a young woman’s struggle to carve a place for herself—for her black female body—in a world of deeply conflicting messages.

Told entirely in verse, Ada’s story encompasses her earliest memories as a child, including her abuse at the hands of a young cousin, her mother’s rejection and descent into addiction, and her father’s attempts to create a home for his American daughter more like the one he knew in Nigeria.

The present-tense of the book is Ada’s first year at Howard University in Washington DC, where she must finally confront the fundamental conflict between who her family says she should be and what her body tells her she must be.