Jacqueline Woodson Quotes
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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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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.
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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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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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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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Hope is universal.
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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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I think 'Miracle's Boys' made more people aware of my work.
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In writing 'Another Brooklyn,' I had to imagine what happens when friendships dissolve.
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I couldn't be a writer without hope. I think I became a writer because I'm pretty optimistic.
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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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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 would have written 'Brown Girl Dreaming' if no one had ever wanted to buy it, if it went nowhere but inside a desk drawer that my own children pulled out one day to find a tool for survival, a symbol of how strong we are and how much we've come through.
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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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People want to know and understand each other across lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability.
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I don't believe there are 'struggling' readers, 'advanced' readers, or 'non' readers.
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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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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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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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To be poet laureate is to try to spread the love and the accessibility of poetry to young people.
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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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Both racism and homophobia come from a sense of the presumed and the unknown.
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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.