Diversity is about all of us, and about us having to figure out how to walk through this world together.
Jacqueline Woodson
The more specific we are, the more universal something can become. Life is in the details. If you generalize, it doesn't resonate. The specificity of it is what resonates.
I think 'Miracle's Boys' made more people aware of my work.
Readers are hungry to have their stories in the world, to see mirrors of themselves if the stories are about people like them, and to have windows if the stories are about people who have been historically absent in literature.
The civil rights movement was about access to public space. We had to fight for public space.
The idea of feeling isolated is scary to me - to walk through the world alone would be heartbreaking.
I always say I write because I have questions, not because I have answers. It's true that you begin the conversation - that's the role of the artist. But it's not my job to tell us what to do next. I wish I had those tools.
Young people are often ignored and disregarded, but they are acute observers and learners of everything we say and do.
The Great Migration can get forgotten if we don't pay attention or bear witness to it. It's part of my personal history and the history of millions of African Americans who left those oppressive conditions for better lives in the North. It's important to put that on the page.
Friendship is such an important thing to me, and I feel like the people who I love and help keep me whole - I can't imagine a life without them.
I didn't know how many independent bookstores had amazing wine lists until I toured with 'Another Brooklyn.'
I'm inspired by questions I have that I try to figure out the answers to through my writing.
I still love Carson McCullers and Raymond Carver and Toni Morrison and James Baldwin.
Reading equals hope times change.
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.
Greenville, S.C., in the 1970s is a rolling green dream in my memory now.
Sometimes, when I'm sitting at my desk for long hours and nothing's coming to me, I remember my fifth-grade teacher, the way her eyes lit up when she said, 'This is really good.'
'Brown Girl Dreaming' was a book I had a lot of doubts about - mainly, would this story be meaningful to anyone besides me? My editor, Nancy Paulsen, kept assuring me, but there were moments when I was in a really sad place with the story for so many reasons. It wasn't an easy book to write - emotionally, physically, or creatively.
I love writing for young people. It's the literature that was most important to me, the stories that shaped me and informed my own journey as a writer.
Memory doesn't come as a straight narrative. It comes in small moments with all this white space.
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.
As a child in South Carolina, I spent summers like so many children - sitting on my grandparents' back porch with my siblings, spitting watermelon seeds into the garden or, even worse, swallowing them and trembling as my older brother and sister spoke of the vine that was probably already growing in my belly.
In writing 'Another Brooklyn,' I had to imagine what happens when friendships dissolve.
To be poet laureate is to try to spread the love and the accessibility of poetry to young people.
What I write comes from a place of deep love, and a deep understanding of all kinds of otherness.
My mother was a single mom whose days were spent as a customer service rep at Con Edison in downtown Brooklyn.
If someone has something they're really passionate about, that's their brilliance, and my big question is how do we grow that passion/brilliance and/or help them grow.
Even after Jim Crow was supposed to not be a part of the South anymore, there were still ways in which you couldn't get away from it. And I think once I got to Brooklyn, there was this freedom we had.
I deeply believe in many Christian values: love people; do the right thing; know that there's good in everyone, that God's looking out for all of us.
Being a Witness was too closed an experience. That's what I walked away from, not the things I believe.
When I was a kid, I got in trouble for lying a lot, and I had a teacher say, 'Instead of lying, write it down, because if you write it down, it's not a lie anymore; it's fiction.'
I rewrite a lot until I get the rhythm and story right on the page.
When I'm feeling frustrated with a story, I have faith that it's going to come. Also, when I first started writing, I wanted to write the stories that were not in my childhood, to represent people who hadn't historically been represented in literature.
I didn't have any idea of what I was getting into by going away to college. And I was scared. I was scared of failing. I was scared of it not being for me because I was going to be one of the first people in my family to go off to college.
If you have no road map, you have to create your own.
I've wanted to be a writer since I was seven, but I didn't grow up in family where people aspired to live as writers.
We, as adults, are the gatekeepers, and we have to check our own fears at the door because we want our children to be smarter than we are. We want them to be more fully human than we are.
The strength of my mother is something I didn't pay attention to for so long. Here she was, this single mom, who was part of the Great Migration, who was part of a Jim Crow south, who said, 'I'm getting my kids out of here. I'm creating opportunities for these young people by any means necessary.'
I realized if I didn't start talking to my relatives, asking questions, thinking back to my own beginnings, there would come a time when those people wouldn't be around to help me look back and remember.
People want to know and understand each other across lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability.
I think when I was a young person, there was just kind of - there was very little dialogue about it. And there was just kind of one way to be gay, right? You saw very effeminate guys. You saw very butch women. And there was no kind of in-between. And there was no - you know, there wasn't anything in the media. There wasn't anything on television.
The epistolary form is one of the hardest to write. It's so hard to show something that's bigger in a letter. Plus, you have to have the balance of how many letters are going to work to tell the story and how few are going to make it fall apart.
In the midst of observing the world and coming to consciousness, I was becoming a writer, and what I wanted to put on the page were the stories of people who looked like me.
I love playing with form. I love playing with sounds... I love music, and I love writing that has a musicality to it.
Each book I write is a shout into the silence and a prayer and a plea for change.
In young adult novels and children's books, you stay in moment. The story goes through a school year or a weekend. You never get a sense of a future self because the young person has not lived that yet.
I feel like, as a person of color, I've always been kind of doing the work against the tide.
My writing is inspired by where I come from, where I am today, and where I hope to go some day.
I love how much love there is in the world of young adult and children's literature.
The South was very segregated. I mean, all through my childhood, long after Jim Crow was supposed to not be in existence, it was still a very segregated South.
