Concept

Jacqueline Woodson

Summary
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. 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 to 2019. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2020. 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, before moving to Brooklyn at about the age of seven. She also states where she lives in her autobiography, Brown Girl Dreaming. As a child, Woodson enjoyed telling stories and always knew she wanted to be a writer. Her 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. [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. 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, but Willoughby left the company before editing it and so Wendy Lamb took over and saw Woodson's first. Woodson's youth was split between South Carolina and Brooklyn.
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