Jacqueline Woodson

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Jacqueline Woodson (born February 12, 1963) is an American writer of children and adolescents.

She is best known for Miracle's Boys and her Newbery Honor-winning titles Brown Girl Dreaming, After Tupac and D Foster, Feathers, and Show Way.

She was named National Ambassador for Young People's Literature by the Library of Congress for 2018–19 after serving as the Young People's Poet Laureate from 2015–17.

In spring of 2017, she was also a visiting fellow at the American Library in Paris.

Early years

Jacqueline Woodson was born in Columbus, Ohio, and spent in Nelsonville, Ohio, before her family moved south. During her early years, she lived in Greenville, South Carolina, before transferring to Brooklyn at the age of seven. In her autobiography, Brown Girl Dreaming, she also states where she lives.

Personal life

Woodson, a surgeon, and her partner Juliet Widoff live in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The couple have two children, Toshi Georgianna's daughter, and Jackson-Leroi's son.

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Writing career

Woodson went to work with Kirchoff/Wohlberg, a children's packaging business, after college. Liza Pulitzer-Voges, a children's book agent with the same company, was involved in the development of the California standard reading tests and attracted the attention of Liza Pulitzer-Voges. Even if the partnership didn't turn out, Woodson's first manuscript was retrieved from a drawer. Bebe Willoughby, a deputy editor at Delacorte, received a reading from last summer with Maizon and requested the book to be published. She then enrolled in Bunny Gable's children's book writing class at The New School, where Bebe Willoughby, an editor at Delacorte, learned about the book. Delacorte bought the manuscript but Willoughby left the company before rewriting it, and Wendy Lamb took over and saw Woodson's first.

Woodson's youth was split between South Carolina and Brooklyn. "The South was so lush and slow-moving, and so much about community," Jennifer M. Brown described in her interview with her. The city was flourishing and booming, as well as electric. On the block where I grew up, there were Germans, Dominican Republic workers, Dominican Americans, African-Americans from Puerto Rico, African-Americans from the South, Caribbean-Americans, Asians.

In an interview with journalist Hazel Rochman, Woodson answered, "Today major writers for me are James Baldwin and Virginia Hamilton." Virginia Hamilton was a sister like me, which blew me away. Nikki Giovanni had a similar affect on me later. I think I learned how to write from Baldwin. He was into some futuristic stuff, writing about race and gender long before people were familiar with such discussions. Each of his characters was remarkably realistic, and he'd cross class lines all over the place. "I still pull him down from my shelf when I get stuck." Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sula, Rosa Guy's work, as well as her high-school English teacher, Mr. Miller, were among her early influences. Louise Meriwether was also named.

Woodson's books are best known for the intricate physical landscapes she creates. She places boundaries everywhere—economic, physical, sexual, and racial—and she makes her characters break through both physical and mental boundaries in order to tell a good and emotional story. She is also known for her optimism. She has stated that she does not like books that do not have hope. She has used the novel Sounder as an example of a "bleak" and "hopeless" book. On the other hand, she loved A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Despite being extremely poor, the characters' "moments of faith and sheer beauty" were present. "If you love the people you make," she writes in her own journal, "you will see the hope there."

She writes specifically for a younger audience as a writer. Authors write about adolescence or from a youth's point of view, but adult audiences are not intended. Woodson addresses childhood and adolescence with the intent of a young audience. "I'm writing about adolescents for adolescents," she said in a National Public Radio interview (NPR). And I think the biggest difference is when you're writing to a specific age group, especially a younger age group — the writing can't be as explicit. You're more in the moment. They don't have the opportunity to look back because they don't have the adult experience. So you're at a point in being an adolescent, and the immediacy and urgency are on the page, since it seems to be an adolescent. Everything is so important, so large, it's traumatic. All of that has to be in place for them."

Woodson has, in turn, influenced many other writers, including An Na, who describes her as her first writing instructor. She also teaches teens at the National Book Foundation's summer writing camp, where she co-edits the annual anthology of their combined work. In spring of 2017, she was also a visiting scholar at the American Library in Paris.

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