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 think 'Miracle's Boys' made more people aware of my work.
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There was something about telling the lie-story and seeing your friends' eyes grow wide with wonder. Of course I got in trouble for lying, but I didn't stop until fifth grade.
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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.'
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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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'Another Brooklyn' came to me in this kind of dreamlike series of vignettes.
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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 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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Both racism and homophobia come from a sense of the presumed and the unknown.
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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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Hope is universal.
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My mother was a single mom whose days were spent as a customer service rep at Con Edison in downtown Brooklyn.
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In writing 'Another Brooklyn,' I had to imagine what happens when friendships dissolve.
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People want to know and understand each other across lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability.
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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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I couldn't be a writer without hope. I think I became a writer because I'm pretty optimistic.
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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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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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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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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 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.
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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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The idea of feeling isolated is scary to me - to walk through the world alone would be heartbreaking.