Jacqueline Woodson facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Jacqueline Woodson
Woodson at the 2018 U.S. National Book Festival
Born	Jacqueline Amanda Woodson (1963-02-12) February 12, 1963 (age 61) Columbus, Ohio, United States
Occupation	Writer
Alma mater	Adelphi University The New School
Period	1990-present
Genre	Young adult fiction
Subject	African-American literature
Notable works	Miracle's Boys (2000) Show Way (2006) Feathers (2007) After Tupac and D Foster (2008) Brown Girl Dreaming (2014)
Notable awards	National Book Award National Ambassador for Young People's Literature MacArthur Fellowship
Partner	Juliet Widoff
Children	2

Jacqueline Woodson (born February 12, 1963) is an American writer of books for 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.

Early years

Jacqueline Woodson was born in Columbus, Ohio, and lived in Nelsonville, Ohio, before her family moved south. During her early years she lived in Greenville, South Carolina. She moved to Brooklyn at about the age of seven.

Woodson's youth was split between South Carolina and Brooklyn. In her interview with Jennifer M. Brown she remembered: "The South was so lush and so slow-moving and so much about community. The city was thriving and fast-moving and electric. Brooklyn was so much more diverse: on the block where I grew up, there were German people, people from the Dominican Republic, people from Puerto Rico, African-Americans from the South, Caribbean-Americans, Asians."

As a child, Woodson enjoyed telling stories and always knew she wanted to be a writer.

Writing career

After college, Woodson went to work for Kirchoff/Wohlberg, a children's packaging company. She helped to write the California standardized reading tests and caught the attention of Liza Pulitzer-Voges, a children's book agent at the same company. Although the partnership did not work out, it did get Woodson's first manuscript out of a drawer.

She then enrolled in Bunny Gable's children's book writing class at The New School, where Bebe Willoughby, an editor at Delacorte, heard a reading from Last Summer with Maizon and requested the manuscript. Delacorte bought the manuscript.

Style

As an author, Woodson's known for the detailed physical landscapes she writes into each of her books. She places boundaries everywhere—social, economic, physical, racial—then has her characters break through both the physical and psychological boundaries to create a strong and emotional story. She is also known for her optimism. She has said that she dislikes books that do not offer hope. She has offered the novel Sounder as an example of a "bleak" and "hopeless" novel. On the other hand, she enjoyed A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Even though the family was exceptionally poor, the characters experienced "moments of hope and sheer beauty". She uses this philosophy in her own writing, saying: "If you love the people you create, you can see the hope there."

As a writer she consciously writes for a younger audience. There are authors who write about adolescence or from a youth's point of view, but their work is intended for adult audiences. Woodson writes about childhood and adolescence with an audience of youth in mind. In an interview on National Public Radio (NPR) she said, "I'm writing about adolescents for adolescents. And I think the main difference is when you're writing to a particular age group, especially a younger age group, you're — the writing can't be as implicit. You're more in the moment. They don't have the adult experience from which to look back. So you're in the moment of being an adolescent ... and the immediacy and the urgency is very much on the page, because that's what it feels like to be an adolescent. Everything is so important, so big, so traumatic. And all of that has to be in place for them."

Teaching

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

Themes

Woodson along with writer Jason Reynolds and Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden in January 2020

Woodson believes that her books address universal questions. She has tackled subjects that were not commonly discussed when her books were published, including interracial couples and homosexuality. She often does this with sympathetic characters put into realistic situations. Woodson states that her interests lie in exploring many different perspectives through her writings, not in forcing her views onto others.

Woodson has several themes that appear in many of her novels. She explores issues of gender, class and race as well as family and history. She is known for using these common themes in ground-breaking ways. While many of her characters are given labels that make them "invisible" to society, Woodson is most often writing about their search for self rather than a search for equality or social justice.

Gender

Only The Notebooks of Melanin Sun, Miracle's Boys and Locomotion are written from a male perspective. The rest of Woodson's works feature female narrators. However, her 2009 small story "Trev", published in How Beautiful the Ordinary: Twelve Stories of Identity, features a transgender male narrator.

African-American society and history

In her 2003 novel, Coming on Home Soon, she explores both race and gender within the historical context of World War II.

The Other Side is a poetic look at race through two young girls, one black and one white, who sit on either side of the fence that separates their worlds.

Red at the Bone (2019), a novel, weaves together stories of three generations of one Black family, including the trauma resulting from the Tulsa Race Massacre and the September 11 attacks.

Economic status

The Dear One is notable for dealing with the differences between rich and poor within the black community.

Identity issues

The House You Pass on the Way is a novel that touches on gay identity through the main characters of Staggerlee.

Staggerlee knows who she is for the most part, but her friend Trout is struggling, conforming, trying to fit in somewhere. I wish I had had this book when I was a kid and trying to fit in while being a tomboy and so unfeminine.

In The Dear One Woodson introduces a strongly committed lesbian relationship between Marion and Bernadette. She then contrasts it to the broken straight family that results in a teenager from Harlem named Rebecca moving in with them and their 12-year-old daughter, Feni.

Personal life

Woodson lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with her partner Juliet Widoff, a physician. The couple have two children, a daughter named Toshi Georgianna and a son named Jackson-Leroi.

Jacqueline Woodson quotes

• "I wanted to write about communities that were familiar to me and people that were familiar to me. I wanted to write about communities of color. I wanted to write about girls. I wanted to write about friendship and all of these things that I felt like were missing in a lot of the books that I read as a child."
• "Black women have been everywhere--building the railroads, cleaning the kitchens, starting revolutions, writing poetry, leading voter registration drives and leading slaves to freedom. We've been there and done that. I want the people who have come before me to be part of the stories that I'm telling, because if it weren't for them, I wouldn't be telling stories."
• "Diversity is about all of us, and about us having to figure out how to walk through this world together."
• "If you have no road map, you have to create your own."
• "My writing is inspired by where I come from, where I am today, and where I hope to go some day."
• "The hardest part is telling one's story. Once the story is on the page, the rest will come."
• "Childhood, young adulthood is fluid. And it's very easy to get labeled very young and have to carry something through your childhood and into your adulthood that is not necessarily who you are."

Interesting facts about Jacqueline Woodson

• Woodson's favorite books when she was young were Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Match Girl" and Mildred D. Taylor's Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.
• Woodson has mentioned James Baldwin, Virginia Hamilton, Nikki Giovanni, Louise Meriwether among her inspirations. Other early influences included Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sula, and the work of Rosa Guy, as well as her high-school English teacher, Mr. Miller.
• After serving as the Young People's Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, she was named the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, by the Library of Congress, for 2018–19.
• She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2020.
• She published her autobiography, Brown Girl Dreaming in 2014.
• Some of her books contain harsh language and sensitive topics, such as homosexuality. This has led to issues with censorship.

Awards and honors

Complete works

Novels

Middle grade titles

Young adult titles

Illustrated works

Adaptations

Film

Filmmaker Spike Lee and others made Miracle's Boys into a miniseries, airing in 2005.

Audio recordings

• I Hadn't Meant to Tell You This, Recorded Books, 1999
• Lena, Recorded Books, 1999
• Miracle's Boys, Listening Library, 2001
• Locomotion, Recorded Books, 2003
• Show Way, Weston Woods, 2012
• Brown Girl Dreaming, Penguin Audio, 2014
• If You Come Softly, Listening Library, 2018
• Harbor Me, Listening Library, 2018
• The Day You Begin, Listening Library, 2018
• Visiting Day, Listening Library, 2018
• Before Her, part of "The One" series, Brilliance Publishing, 2019
• Red at the Bone, Penguin Audio, 2019

See also

• List of winners of the National Book Award