Jacqueline Woodson Quotes
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I love playing with form. I love playing with sounds... I love music, and I love writing that has a musicality to it.
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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.
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I think there is such a richness to the South and a lushness and a way of life.
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I feel like once I say out loud, to the public, what I'm working on, it's never going to be an actual book. So until it's close to done, I keep pretty quiet about my next stuff!
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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.
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The idea of feeling isolated is scary to me - to walk through the world alone would be heartbreaking.
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What I write comes from a place of deep love, and a deep understanding of all kinds of otherness.
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My family is big, complicated, and beautiful - and keeps me smiling and whole. It's so important to have family, whether it's biological family, good friends, foster families, or a group of aunties who are raising you. The idea of feeling isolated is scary to me - to walk through the world alone would be heartbreaking.
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Told a lot of stories as a child. Not 'Once upon a time' stories but, basically, outright lies. I loved lying and getting away with it!
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I don't believe there are 'struggling' readers, 'advanced' readers, or 'non' readers.
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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.
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People want to know and understand each other across lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability.
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I think there is much more queer visibility than there was when I was a kid. There is marriage, more trans visibility, and many more celebrities who are open about the sexuality. This was so not the case when I was a kid.
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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.
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In the family, writing wasn't anything anyone understood - being a writer in the real world? How could it be? We didn't have those mirrors.
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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.
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In all my childhood, I never heard my grandparents say that anything shocked or surprised them. They knew what their country was capable of.
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The conscious imprinting that happens between, say, 10 and 16 is huge. I think it's so important for me as a writer to stay open to the memories of that period because they were so formative.
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In writing 'Another Brooklyn,' I had to imagine what happens when friendships dissolve.
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With my writing, I try to do stuff I have not done before. Each time I sit down, I want to have a new experience, and by extension, I want my readers to have a different experience.
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I think 'Miracle's Boys' made more people aware of my work.
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I love how much love there is in the world of young adult and children's literature.
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I'm inspired by questions I have that I try to figure out the answers to through my writing.
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To me, elegy suggests that there is hope, and in some respects you've moved past the loss and are able to deal with it and to write about it.