[1] Born in Haiti as Pascale Philantrope,[2] Zoboi immigrated from Port-au-Prince with her mother at age four and grew up in Bushwick, Brooklyn, in the 1980s.

[9] In 2018, Zoboi received the Americas Award for Children's and Young Adult Literature from the Library of Congress.

[10] While working on her MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults, she was chosen as a finalist for the New Visions Award before publishing her debut novel.

The Farming of Gods is an example of Afrofuturism and combines aspects of traditional Haitian belief systems with futuristic and dystopian concepts.

[18] The novel is set in Detroit, Michigan because she wanted the story to be told according to her experiences in Bushwick in the 1980s, a neighborhood changed since her childhood.

[23] My Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich, Zoboi's 2019 middle-grade novel, is about Ebony-Grace, a girl who is sent from Alabama to help her grandfather in Harlem in the 1980s and is her first middle grade book.

[26] Her 2023 young adult novel, Nigeria Jones, published by Balzer + Bray, won the 2024 Coretta Scott King Author Award.