Jacqueline Woodson
In 2018, Jacqueline Woodson accepted the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, one of the most substantial prizes in children's and young adult literature — a moment that placed her work in conversation with the longest traditions of writing for young readers. That same year, she began serving as the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, a role she held through 2019.
Born on February 12, 1963, in Columbus, Woodson is a citizen of the United States who was educated at Adelphi University. She works across several forms, practicing as a novelist, poet, children's writer, young adult author, and film director, with English as her language of composition. Her notable works include Brown Girl Dreaming, Another Brooklyn, Miracle's Boys, and Feathers, titles that span poetry, fiction for children, and fiction for adult and young adult readers.
The recognition attached to Woodson's career is considerable and varied. She received the National Book Award for Young People's Literature and a Newbery Honor, as well as the Coretta Scott King Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Charlotte Zolotow Award, and the Langston Hughes Medal. Institutions have also recognized her broader contribution: she holds a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellows Program fellowship, and she received the Hans Christian Andersen Award, an international honor given to an author whose complete body of work has made a lasting contribution to literature for children and young people. From 2015 to 2017 she served as the Young People's Poet Laureate.
The accumulation of those distinctions — from the MacArthur fellowship to the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award to her two years as National Ambassador for Young People's Literature — reflects the range of her output as novelist, poet, and children's writer. That ambassadorship, running from 2018 to 2019, placed her in a public role advocating directly on behalf of young readers across the United States, grounding her work in a specific institutional and civic context rather than leaving it solely within the literary sphere.
Quotes by Jacqueline Woodson
Jacqueline Woodson's insights on:
I feel like, as a person of color, I've always been kind of doing the work against the tide.
In writing 'Another Brooklyn,' I had to imagine what happens when friendships dissolve.
I love playing with form. I love playing with sounds... I love music, and I love writing that has a musicality to it.
The writing that I have found to be most false is the writing that doesn't offer hope.
What I learned for myself... is that no matter what the circumstances, people survive.
My grandparents were wealthy; my mom was not. I would walk into these worlds of privilege and then walk back into this other world. My little brother is biracial. So race and economic class and sexuality - these were always issues that were a part of my life.
My sister taught me how to write my name when I was about three. I remember writing my whole name: Jacqueline Amanda Woodson. I just loved the power of that, of being able to put a letter on the page and that letter meaning something.