Harbor Me Study Guide

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.

Harbor Me was published in 2018, two years into Donald Trump’s 2016­–2020 U.S. presidency. During this period in American politics, topics that the ARTT kids discuss freely—things like race, immigration, and class—were particularly contentious and divisive. Woodson also makes explicit reference to patterns of police brutality against Black youth in Amari’s story and the ARTT group’s reactions to it. For instance, Tamir Rice was killed by Cleveland police while playing with a toy gun in public in 2014. In the ensuing discussion, Amari also brings up another case that matches the 2014 killing of Eric Garner, a man with asthma who died of strangulation while a member of the New York Police Department held him in an unauthorized chokehold.

To learn more about Woodson’s early life and family history, her award-winning semi-autobiographical work Brown Girl Dreaming (2014) is an excellent starting place. Other comparable middle-grade titles include Janae Marks’s From the Desk of Zoe Washington (2020), which also features a protagonist who struggles with her father’s imprisonment, and Jason Reynolds’s Look Both Ways (2019), which also weaves several different characters’ stories into one novel. Ghost Boys (2018) by Jewell Parker Rhodes and The Crossover (2014) by Kwame Alexander both explore what it means to be a Black boy in America in ways that resonate with Amari’s coming-of-age story in Harbor Me. Woodson has often cited James Baldwin and Virginia Hamilton as authors that have influenced her own work; to read their books, middle-grade audiences could start with Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953) and M. C. Higgins, the Great (1974), respectively. In Harbor Me, Woodson often references A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943); Harbor Me borrows everything from its epigraph to the Ailanthus tree outside of Haley’s window from this book. Finally, Harbor Me’s treatment of immigration, deportation, freedom, justice, and “harbor” is very much in dialogue with Emma Lazarus’s 1883 sonnet “The New Colossus.”