Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1963. She spent her early childhood in Greenville, a segregated town in South Carolina, during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Her best-known book, Brown Girl Dreaming (2014), explores these years of her life alongside her family history. When Woodson was seven, her family moved to Brooklyn, New York, a place that would inspire the setting of many of her later novels. It was there that she decided to become a writer in the fifth grade. After graduating from Adelphi College, Woodson worked with homeless youth for several years before beginning her long career as an author. Her work began to garner attention and acclaim with the publication of Miracle’s Boys (2000), a novel about three parentless brothers living in Harlem that won the Coretta Scott King Award and was later adapted into a TV miniseries. Several of her books from the 2000s, including Feather (2007) and After Tupac and D Foster (2008), won Newbery Honors. Following the publication of Brown Girl Dreaming, which won the National Book Award, Woodson served terms as the Young People’s Poet Laureate and the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. In 2019, Woodson published her first book for adults, Red at the Bone. In the following year, she became a MacArthur Genius Fellow. Woodson currently lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with her partner and two children. To date, she has written over 40 books.