Woodson, Jacqueline (1963-…), is an American writer of books and poetry for children and young adults. She is known for writing about characters from a variety of racial backgrounds, ethnic groups, and social classes. Woodson often tackles challenging subject matter, such as gender identity, same-sex relationships, and sexual abuse, and her characters are often engaged in a search for identity.
Woodson has received three Coretta Scott King Awards. The awards honor African American authors and illustrators. Woodson won the first award in 2001 for the young adult novel Miracle’s Boys (2000), about three young biracial brothers growing up without parents in New York City, New York. She won the award again in 2015 for the memoir Brown Girl Dreaming (2014). In the memoir, she uses vivid poems to describe her life growing up in both the Northern and Southern United States during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Woodson received the third award in 2021 for Before and Ever After (2020), about a boy whose father, a former football star, is losing his memory due to head injuries he experienced as a player. Brown Girl Dreaming also won the 2014 National Book Foundation’s National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. In 2018, Woodson received the Children’s Literature Legacy Award (formerly called the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award), which honors an author or illustrator whose books, published in the United States, have made a significant and lasting contribution to literature for children.
From 2015 to 2017, Woodson served as Young People’s Poet Laureate, an honorary title awarded by the Poetry Foundation, an independent American literary organization. In 2018, the librarian of Congress appointed Woodson to a two-year term as National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature.
Jacqueline Amanda Woodson was born on Feb. 12, 1963, in Columbus, Ohio. She grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, and in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, New York. Woodson graduated from Adelphi University with a B.A. degree in English. She worked as a drama therapist for runaway and homeless children in New York City.
Woodson’s first book was Last Summer With Maizon (1990), about two 11-year-old girls who are friends growing up in Brooklyn. It was followed by two other books in the series, Maizon at Blue Hill (1992) and Between Madison and Palmetto (1993). Woodson has also written a number of picture books, beginning with Martin Luther King, Jr. and His Birthday (1990). Her later picture books include Coming On Home Soon (2004), Each Kindness (2012), The Day You Begin (2018), and The Year We Learned to Fly and The World Belonged to Us (both 2022).
Woodson’s other books for middle-grade readers and young adults include I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This (1994) and its sequel, Lena (1999); From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun (1995); The House You Pass on the Way (1997); If You Come Softly (1998); Hush (2002); Behind You (2004); Feathers (2007); After Tupac and D Foster (2008); Beneath a Meth Moon (2012); and Harbor Me (2018).
Woodson has also written books for adults. Such books include Autobiography of a Family Photo (1994), Another Brooklyn (2016), and Red at the Bone (2019).
