Jacqueline Woodson
Encyclopedia
Jacqueline Woodson is an American author who writes books targeted at children and adolescents. She is best known for 'Miracle's Boys' which won the Coretta Scott King Award
in 2001 and her Newbery Honor titles 'After Tupac & D Foster', 'Feathers' and 'Show Way'. Her work is filled with strong African American themes, generally aimed at a young adult audience. She is an openly lesbian woman with a lifelong partner and two children, a daughter named Toshi Georgianna and a son named Jackson-Leroi.
Her college education includes receiving a B.A. in English from Adelphi University
in 1985 and studying creative writing at New School for Social Research (now New School University).
In addition to her writing, Woodson has also worked as a writing professor at Goddard College
, Eugene Lang College, Vermont College as well as a Writer-in-residence for the National Book Foundation
. She has also held positions as an editorial assistant and a drama therapist for runaway children in New York, NY.
She lives in Brooklyn, New York in a racially diverse neighborhood.
When asked to name her literary influences in an interview with journalist
Hazel Rochman, Woodson responded, "Two major writers for me are James Baldwin
and Virginia Hamilton
. It blew me away to find out Virginia Hamilton was a sister like me. Later, Nikki Giovanni
had a similar effect on me. I feel that I learned how to write from Baldwin. He was onto some future stuff, writing about race and gender long before people were comfortable with those dialogues. He would cross class lines all over the place, and each of his characters was remarkably believable. I still pull him down from my shelf when I feel stuck."
Other early influences included Toni Morrison
's The Bluest Eye
and Sula
, and the work of Rosa Guy
as well as her high school English teacher, Mr. Miller. Louise Meriwether was also named.
Jacqueline Woodson has, in turn, influenced many other writers, including An Na
, who credits her as being her first writing teacher. She also teaches teens at the National Book Foundation
's summer writing camp where she co-edits the annual anthology of their combined work.
As an author, Woodson is known for the detailed physical landscapes she writes into each of her books. She places boundaries everywhere—social, economic, physical, sexual, racial—then has her characters break through both the physical and pychological boundaries to create a strong and emotional story.
She is also known for her optimism. She has said that she dislikes books that do not offer hope. She has offered the novel Sounder as and example of a 'bleak' and 'hopeless' novel. On the other hand, she enjoyed A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Even though the family was exceptionally poor, the characters experienced "moments of hope and sheer beauty". She uses this philosophy in her own writing, saying, "If you love the people you create, you can see the hope there."
As a writer she consciously writes for a younger audience. There are authors who write about adolescence or from a youths point of view, but their work is intended for adult audiences. Woodson writes about childhood and adolescence with an audience of youth in mind. In an interview on National Public Radio she said, "I'm writing about adolescents for adolescents. And I think the main difference is when you're writing to a particular age group, especially a younger age group, you're — the writing can't be as implicit. You're more in the moment. They don't have the adult experience from which to look back. So you're in the moment of being an adolescent...and the immediacy and the urgency is very much on the page, because that's what it feels like to be an adolescent. Everything is so important, so big, so traumatic. And all of that has to be in place for them."
Woodson has several themes that appear in many of her novels. She explores issues of gender, class and race as well as family and history. She is known for using these common themes in ground-breaking ways. While many of her characters are given labels that make them 'invisible' to society, Woodson is most often writing about their search for self rather than a search for equality or social justice.
, features a transsexual narrator.
.
The Other Side is a poetic look at race through two young girls, one black and one white, who sit on either side of the fence which separates their world.
In 'The Dear One' Woodson introduces a strongly committed lesbian relationship between Marion and Bernadette. She then contrasts it to the broken straight family which results in a teenager from Harlem named Rebecca moving in with them and their twelve-year-old daughter, Feni.
. "Sexual abuse happens. Parents leave. These things happen every day and people think that if they don't talk about it, then it will just go away. But that's what makes it spread like the plague it is. People say that they're censoring in the guise of protecting children, but if they'd open their eyes they'd see that kids are exposed to this stuff every day, and we need a venue by which to talk to them about it and start a dialogue. My writing comes from this place, of wanting to change the world. I feel like young people are the most open."
and others made Miracle's Boys into a mini-series.
Lena, Recorded Books, 1999
Miracle's Boys, Listening Library, 2001
Locomotion, Recorded Books, 2003
Coretta Scott King Award
The Coretta Scott King Award is an annual award presented by the Ethnic & Multicultural Information Exchange Round Table, part of the American Library Association...
in 2001 and her Newbery Honor titles 'After Tupac & D Foster', 'Feathers' and 'Show Way'. Her work is filled with strong African American themes, generally aimed at a young adult audience. She is an openly lesbian woman with a lifelong partner and two children, a daughter named Toshi Georgianna and a son named Jackson-Leroi.
Childhood and Youth
Jacqueline Amanda Woodson was born to Jack and Mary Ann Woodson on February 12, 1963. Although she was born in Columbus, Ohio she and her younger brother, who is biracial, grew up moving back and forth between South Carolina and Brooklyn, NY between 1968 and 1973 until her grandmother finally settled in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. Her mother was not wealthy, but her grandparents were; she felt the economic differences each time she moved from one location to the other. She never felt that she truly belonged in either location, but began to define herself as "outside of the world" even before she reached her teens.Education
As is the case for many teens, her high school years were confusing. Although she dated a basketball player and had a clique of girls she belonged to, her sexuality was not conforming to the ideas of many of her classmates and she found herself questioning everything. Her political views were crushed when Nixon resigned and Ford was sworn in. The young writer felt that George McGovern should have been the new president, since he had lost the election to Nixon. When teachers couldn't give her acceptable answers to her questions she became a loner, sullen and looking for an outlet for her frustrations. She spent a lot of her time writing poems and songs that expressed her social and political disenchantment.Her college education includes receiving a B.A. in English from Adelphi University
Adelphi University
Adelphi University is a private, nonsectarian university located in Garden City, in Nassau County, New York, United States. It is the oldest institution of higher education on Long Island. For the sixth year, Adelphi University has been named a “Best Buy” in higher education by the Fiske Guide to...
in 1985 and studying creative writing at New School for Social Research (now New School University).
Personal life
Woodson and her partner have known each other since they were young girls. In 2006 Woodson gave birth to a daughter, Toshi Georgianna. The child is named after her godmother, Toshi Seeger, and Woodson's grandmother, Georgianna. She also has a son named Jackson-Leroi.In addition to her writing, Woodson has also worked as a writing professor at Goddard College
Goddard College
Goddard College is a private, liberal arts college located in Plainfield, Vermont, offering undergraduate and graduate degree programs. Goddard College currently operates on an intensive low-residency model...
, Eugene Lang College, Vermont College as well as a Writer-in-residence for the National Book Foundation
National Book Foundation
The National Book Foundation, founded in 1989, is an American nonprofit literary organization established "to raise the cultural appreciation of great writing in America." It achieves this through sponsoring the National Book Award, as well as the medal for Distinguished Contribution to American...
. She has also held positions as an editorial assistant and a drama therapist for runaway children in New York, NY.
She lives in Brooklyn, New York in a racially diverse neighborhood.
Writing career
After college Woodson went to work for Kirchoff/Wohlberg, a children's packaging company. She helped to write the California standardized reading tests and caught the attention of a Liza Pulitzer-Voges, a children's book agent at the same company. Although the partnership didn't work out, it did get her first manuscript out of a drawer. She then enrolled in Bunny Gable's children's book writing class at the New School where Bebe Willoughby, an editor at Delacorte heard a reading from Last Summer with Maizon and requested the manuscript. Delacorte bought the manuscript, but Willoughby left the company before editing it and so Wendy Lamb took over and saw Woodson's first six books published.Inspirations and Relationships
Woodson's youth was split between South Carolina and Brooklyn. In her interview with Jennifer M. Brown she remembered, "The South was so lush and so slow-moving and so much about community. The city was thriving and fast-moving and electric. Brooklyn was so much more diverse: on the block where I grew up, there were German people, people from the Dominican Republic, people from Puerto Rico, African-Americans from the South, Caribbean-Americans, Asians."When asked to name her literary influences in an interview with journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...
Hazel Rochman, Woodson responded, "Two major writers for me are James Baldwin
James Baldwin (writer)
James Arthur Baldwin was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic.Baldwin's essays, for instance "Notes of a Native Son" , explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-20th century America,...
and Virginia Hamilton
Virginia Hamilton
Virginia Esther Hamilton was an award-winning author of children's books. She wrote 41 books, including M. C. Higgins, the Great, for which she won the National Book Award in 1974 and the 1975 Newbery Medal....
. It blew me away to find out Virginia Hamilton was a sister like me. Later, Nikki Giovanni
Nikki Giovanni
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni is an American poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. Her primary focus is on the individual and the power one has to make a difference in oneself and in the lives of others. Giovanni’s poetry expresses strong racial pride, respect for family, and her...
had a similar effect on me. I feel that I learned how to write from Baldwin. He was onto some future stuff, writing about race and gender long before people were comfortable with those dialogues. He would cross class lines all over the place, and each of his characters was remarkably believable. I still pull him down from my shelf when I feel stuck."
Other early influences included Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison is a Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, editor, and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed characters. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved...
's The Bluest Eye
The Bluest Eye
The Bluest Eye is a 1970 novel by American author Toni Morrison. It is Morrison's first novel, written while Morrison was teaching at Howard University and was raising her two sons on her own. The story is about a year in the life of a young black girl in Lorain, Ohio, named Pecola...
and Sula
Sula (novel)
Sula is a 1973 novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison.-Plot summary:The Bottom is a mostly black community in Ohio, situated in the hills above the mostly white, wealthier community of Medallion. The Bottom first became a community when a master gave it to his former slave...
, and the work of Rosa Guy
Rosa Guy
Rosa Cuthbert Guy is an American writer.-Biography:Rosa Guy was raised in Harlem from the age of seven and now lives in New York. She immigrated to Harlem, New York in 1932. Soon after her parents, Henry and Audrey Cuthbert, died, she and her sister went to many foster homes...
as well as her high school English teacher, Mr. Miller. Louise Meriwether was also named.
Jacqueline Woodson has, in turn, influenced many other writers, including An Na
An Na
An Na is an American author of children's literature. Like most authors, she was a fervent reader as a child. She eventually became a middle school English and History teacher. She turned to writing novels after taking a young adult literature class while enrolled in a M.F.A. program at Vermont...
, who credits her as being her first writing teacher. She also teaches teens at the National Book Foundation
National Book Foundation
The National Book Foundation, founded in 1989, is an American nonprofit literary organization established "to raise the cultural appreciation of great writing in America." It achieves this through sponsoring the National Book Award, as well as the medal for Distinguished Contribution to American...
's summer writing camp where she co-edits the annual anthology of their combined work.
As an author, Woodson is known for the detailed physical landscapes she writes into each of her books. She places boundaries everywhere—social, economic, physical, sexual, racial—then has her characters break through both the physical and pychological boundaries to create a strong and emotional story.
She is also known for her optimism. She has said that she dislikes books that do not offer hope. She has offered the novel Sounder as and example of a 'bleak' and 'hopeless' novel. On the other hand, she enjoyed A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Even though the family was exceptionally poor, the characters experienced "moments of hope and sheer beauty". She uses this philosophy in her own writing, saying, "If you love the people you create, you can see the hope there."
As a writer she consciously writes for a younger audience. There are authors who write about adolescence or from a youths point of view, but their work is intended for adult audiences. Woodson writes about childhood and adolescence with an audience of youth in mind. In an interview on National Public Radio she said, "I'm writing about adolescents for adolescents. And I think the main difference is when you're writing to a particular age group, especially a younger age group, you're — the writing can't be as implicit. You're more in the moment. They don't have the adult experience from which to look back. So you're in the moment of being an adolescent...and the immediacy and the urgency is very much on the page, because that's what it feels like to be an adolescent. Everything is so important, so big, so traumatic. And all of that has to be in place for them."
Themes
Some reviewers have labeled Woodson's writings as "issue-related", but she believes that her books address universal questions. She has tackled subjects that were not commonly discussed when her books were published, including interracial couples, teenage pregnancy and homosexuality. She often does this with sympathetic characters put into realistic situations. Woodson states that her interests lie in exploring many different perspectives through her writings, not in forcing her views onto others.Woodson has several themes that appear in many of her novels. She explores issues of gender, class and race as well as family and history. She is known for using these common themes in ground-breaking ways. While many of her characters are given labels that make them 'invisible' to society, Woodson is most often writing about their search for self rather than a search for equality or social justice.
Gender
Only The Notebooks of Melanin Sun, Miracle's Boys and Locomotion are written from a male perspective. The rest of Woodson's works feature female narrators. However, her 2009 short story, "Trev," published in How Beautiful the Ordinary: Twelve Stories of IdentityHow Beautiful the Ordinary
How Beautiful the Ordinary: Twelve Stories of Identity is an anthology of LGBTQ short stories for young adults edited by American author Michael Cart. It was first published in 2009...
, features a transsexual narrator.
African American Society and History
In her 2003 novel, Coming on Home Soon, she explores both race and gender within the historical context of World War IIWorld War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
.
The Other Side is a poetic look at race through two young girls, one black and one white, who sit on either side of the fence which separates their world.
Economic Status
The Dear One is notable in that it deals with the differences between rich and poor within the black community.Sexual Identity
The House You Pass on the Way is a novel which touches on gay identity through the main characters of Staggerlee.In 'The Dear One' Woodson introduces a strongly committed lesbian relationship between Marion and Bernadette. She then contrasts it to the broken straight family which results in a teenager from Harlem named Rebecca moving in with them and their twelve-year-old daughter, Feni.
Sexual Abuse
"Death happens," Woodson told Samiya A. Bashir in Black Issues Book ReviewBlack Issues Book Review
Black Issues Book Review was a bimonthly magazine published in the U.S. in which books of interest to African-American readers were reviewed. It was published from 1999 through 2007....
. "Sexual abuse happens. Parents leave. These things happen every day and people think that if they don't talk about it, then it will just go away. But that's what makes it spread like the plague it is. People say that they're censoring in the guise of protecting children, but if they'd open their eyes they'd see that kids are exposed to this stuff every day, and we need a venue by which to talk to them about it and start a dialogue. My writing comes from this place, of wanting to change the world. I feel like young people are the most open."
Critical response
Last Summer with Maizon, Woodson's first book was praised by critics for creating positive female characters and the touching portrayal of the close eleven year-old friends. Reviewers also commented on its convincing sense of place and vivid character relationships. The next two books in the trilogy, Maizon at Blue Hill and Between Madison and Palmetto, were also well received for their realistic characters and strong writing style. The issues of self-esteem and identity are addressed throughout the three books. A few reviewers felt that there was a slight lack of focus as the trilogy touched lightly and quickly on too many different problems in too few pages. The issues of self-esteem and identity are addressed throughout the three books.Censorship
Some of the topics covered in Woodson's books raise flags for many censors. Homosexuality, child abuse, harsh language and other content have led to issues with censorship. In an interview on NPR Woodson said that she uses very few curse words in her books and that the issues adults have with her subject matter say more about what they are uncomfortable with than it does what their students should be thinking about. She suggests that people look at the various outside influences teens have access today, then compare that to the subject matter in her books.Film
In 2002, filmmaker Spike LeeSpike Lee
Shelton Jackson "Spike" Lee is an American film director, producer, writer, and actor. His production company, 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks, has produced over 35 films since 1983....
and others made Miracle's Boys into a mini-series.
Audio Recordings
I Hadn't Meant to Tell You This, Recorded Books, 1999Lena, Recorded Books, 1999
Miracle's Boys, Listening Library, 2001
Locomotion, Recorded Books, 2003