Another Brooklyn (Woodson) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth— February 12, 1963
• Where—Columbus, Ohio, USA
• Raised—Geenville, South Carolina, and Brooklyn, New York
• Education—B.A., Adelphi University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York


Jacqueline Woodson is an American writer of books for children and teens. She is best known for her 2014 Bown Girl Dreaming, which won the National Book Award and a Newbery Honor. In 2016, she published her first adult novel, Another Brooklyn, and in 2019 she released her second adult novel, Red at the Bone, both to wide praise.

Woodson's youth was split between South Carolina and Brooklyn. In a 2002 interview with Publishers Weekly she recalled:

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.

After college at Adelphi University, Woodson went to work for Kirchoff/Wohlberg, a literary agent for children's authors. She caught the attention of a book agent, and athough the partnership did not work out, it got her first manuscript out of a drawer.

She later enrolled in Bunny Gable's children's book writing class at the New School in New York, where an editor at Delacorte, heard a reading from Last Summer with Maizon and requested the manuscript. Delacorte bought the manuscript and published Woodson's first six books.

Writing
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 psychological 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 William H. Armstrong's 1969 novel Sounder as an example of "bleak" and "hopeless"; on the other hand, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn offers "moments of hope and sheer beauty" despite the family's poverty. She uses this philosophy in her own writing, saying, "If you love the people you create, you can see the hope there."

Woodson has tackled topics such as interracial coupling, teenage pregnancy, and homosexuality—subjects not commonly or openly discussed when her books were published. Overall, she explores issues of class, race, family ties, and history in ground-breaking ways, and she does so by placing sympathetic characters into realistic situations. Many of her characters, who might be considered "invisible" in the eyes of society, engage in a search for self-identity rather than equality or social justice.

Some of the content in Woodson's books, however, has raised flags—homosexuality, child abuse, harsh language, and teen pregnancy have led to threats of censorship. In an NPR interview Woodson said that her books contain few curse words and that the difficulty adults have with her subject matter has more to do with their own discomfort than what young people should be thinking about. She suggests parents and teachers assess the many cultural influences over teens and then make a comparison with how her books treat those same issues.

Honors
Woodson's books have won numerous awards, including four Newbery Honors for Brown Girl Dreaming (2014), After Tupac & D Foster (2008), Feathers (2007), and Show Way (2005). Miracle's Boys (2000) won the Loretta Scott King Award. In 2005 Woodson won the Margaret Edwards Award for her lifetime contribution as a children's writer.

In 2014 Brown Girl Dreaming won the national Book Award for Young People's Literature. That same year she was the U.S. nominee to the international Hans Christian Andersen Awards and became one of the Award's six finalists. In 2015 the Poetry Foundation named Woodson the Young People's Poet Laureate.

Racial joke
When Woodson received her National Book Award in November, 2014, author Daniel Handler, the evening's emcee, made a joke about watermelons. In a New York Times Op-Ed piece, "The Pain of the Watermelon Joke," Woodson explained that "in making light of that deep and troubled history," Handler had come from a place of ignorance. She underscored the need for her mission to "give people a sense of this country's brilliant and brutal history, so no one ever thinks they can walk onto a stage one evening and laugh at another's too often painful past."

Handler, a friend of Woodson, issued multiple apologies and donated $10,000 to We Need Diverse Books, promising to match donations up to $100,000. "It was a disaster of my own making, he said. "[M]any, many people were very upset by it, and rightfully so."

Personal
Woodson is a lesbian with a partner and two children, a daughter named Toshi Georgianna and a son named Jackson-Leroi. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/17/2016.)