Ilyasah Shabazz

Shabazz is a trustee for the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center, the Malcolm X Foundation, and the Harlem Symphony Orchestra. As of 2017, she is an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

In 2014, Shabazz wrote Malcolm Little: The Boy Who Grew Up to Become Malcolm X, a children's book about her father's childhood. It was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Children's. The following year, she wrote a young-adult novel, X, about the same subject. The book was among the ten finalists considered for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature and it won an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Youth/Teens. It also won honors from the Coretta Scott King Awards and the Walter Dean Myers Awards for Outstanding Children's Literature. Her middle-grade novel about her mother's childhood, Betty Before X, was published in January 2018.

Shabazz wrote Growing Up X, her memoir of her childhood and her personal views on her father, in 2002. It was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Nonfiction. A devout Muslim, she made the pilgrimage to Mecca, the hajj, in 2006 as her father had in 1964 and her mother did in 1965.

In February 1965, when she was two years old, Shabazz was present, with her mother and sisters, at the assassination of her father. She says she has no memory of the event.

Ilyasah Shabazz (born July 22, 1962) is the third daughter of Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz. She is an author, most notably of a memoir, Growing Up X, community organizer, social activist, and motivational speaker.

Shabazz was born in Queens, New York, on July 22, 1962. She was named after Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam, the religious and Black nationalist group to which her parents belonged.