-
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.
Jacqueline Woodson -
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.
Jacqueline Woodson
-
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!
Jacqueline Woodson -
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!
Jacqueline Woodson -
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.
Jacqueline Woodson -
I love how much love there is in the world of young adult and children's literature.
Jacqueline Woodson -
Reading equals hope times change.
Jacqueline Woodson -
The hardest part is telling one's story. Once the story is on the page, the rest will come.
Jacqueline Woodson
-
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.
Jacqueline Woodson -
People want to know and understand each other across lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability.
Jacqueline Woodson -
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.
Jacqueline Woodson -
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.
Jacqueline Woodson -
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.'
Jacqueline Woodson -
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.
Jacqueline Woodson
-
I feel like I am walking in some amazing footsteps of writers who have come before me, like S.E. Hinton, Walter Dean Myers, Christopher Paul Curtis, Richard Peck and Kate DiCamillo, who I love.
Jacqueline Woodson -
In writing 'Another Brooklyn,' I had to imagine what happens when friendships dissolve.
Jacqueline Woodson -
To be poet laureate is to try to spread the love and the accessibility of poetry to young people.
Jacqueline Woodson -
I'm inspired by questions I have that I try to figure out the answers to through my writing.
Jacqueline Woodson -
What I write comes from a place of deep love, and a deep understanding of all kinds of otherness.
Jacqueline Woodson -
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.
Jacqueline Woodson
-
My mother was a single mom whose days were spent as a customer service rep at Con Edison in downtown Brooklyn.
Jacqueline Woodson -
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.
Jacqueline Woodson -
I think that's important: to know 'the other,' as a means of coming to understanding.
Jacqueline Woodson -
Everything I write, I read aloud. It has to sound a certain way and look a certain way on page.
Jacqueline Woodson