Jacqueline Woodson
Memory doesn't come as a straight narrative. It comes in small moments with all this white space.Collection: Space
The more specific we are, the more universal something can become. Life is in the details. If you generalize, it doesn't resonate. The specificity of it is what resonates.Collection: Life
My family is big, complicated, and beautiful - and keeps me smiling and whole. It's so important to have family, whether it's biological family, good friends, foster families, or a group of aunties who are raising you. The idea of feeling isolated is scary to me - to walk through the world alone would be heartbreaking.Collection: Alone
The Great Migration can get forgotten if we don't pay attention or bear witness to it. It's part of my personal history and the history of millions of African Americans who left those oppressive conditions for better lives in the North. It's important to put that on the page.Collection: Great
The strength of my mother is something I didn't pay attention to for so long. Here she was, this single mom, who was part of the Great Migration, who was part of a Jim Crow south, who said, 'I'm getting my kids out of here. I'm creating opportunities for these young people by any means necessary.'Collection: Mom
I feel like I'm a New Yorker to the bone. But there is a lot of the South in me. I know there is a lot of the South in my mannerisms. There's a lot of the South in my expectations of other people and how people treat each other. There's a lot of the South in the way I speak, but it could never be home.Collection: Home
The idea of feeling isolated is scary to me - to walk through the world alone would be heartbreaking.Collection: Alone
Hope is universal.Collection: Hope
I do believe that books can change lives and give people this kind of language they wouldn't have had otherwise.Collection: Change
Friendship is such an important thing to me, and I feel like the people who I love and help keep me whole - I can't imagine a life without them.Collection: Friendship
Diversity is about all of us, and about us having to figure out how to walk through this world together.
If you have no road map, you have to create your own.
I couldn't be a writer without hope. I think I became a writer because I'm pretty optimistic.
As a child in South Carolina, I spent summers like so many children - sitting on my grandparents' back porch with my siblings, spitting watermelon seeds into the garden or, even worse, swallowing them and trembling as my older brother and sister spoke of the vine that was probably already growing in my belly.
Told a lot of stories as a child. Not 'Once upon a time' stories but, basically, outright lies. I loved lying and getting away with it!
Readers are hungry to have their stories in the world, to see mirrors of themselves if the stories are about people like them, and to have windows if the stories are about people who have been historically absent in literature.
I deeply believe in many Christian values: love people; do the right thing; know that there's good in everyone, that God's looking out for all of us.
I love the physical act of writing as well as how I grow which each situation I put on the page.
You can't have too many books featuring people of color, just like you can't have too many books featuring white people.
I can't write about nice, easy topics because that won't change the world. And I do want to change the world - one reader at a time.
The hardest part is telling one's story. Once the story is on the page, the rest will come.
My mom was very strict. And we were very religious. So I knew that I was not allowed to do the wrong thing. And I knew that I had a home I could run to. And I had a mom.
My writing is inspired by where I come from, where I am today, and where I hope to go some day.
A 10-year-old knows a lot. If you think she or he isn't noticing the world around them, you're missing a lot.
What I learned for myself... is that no matter what the circumstances, people survive.
In the midst of observing the world and coming to consciousness, I was becoming a writer, and what I wanted to put on the page were the stories of people who looked like me.
If someone has something they're really passionate about, that's their brilliance, and my big question is how do we grow that passion/brilliance and/or help them grow.
Childhood, young adulthood is fluid. And it's very easy to get labeled very young and have to carry something through your childhood and into your adulthood that is not necessarily who you are.
I realized if I didn't start talking to my relatives, asking questions, thinking back to my own beginnings, there would come a time when those people wouldn't be around to help me look back and remember.
By the time I was in fifth grade, I was dreaming of the Pulitzer Prize.
I feel like, as a person of color, I've always been kind of doing the work against the tide.
I think it's so important that, if I'm writing about the real world, I stay true to it. I think that kids do compartmentalize, and they're hopefully able to see it from a safe place of their own lives and, through that, learn something about empathy.
My kids speak of both subtle slights and blatant racism. It's a narrative I never imagined for them.
I write for whoever needs to read it.
The South was very segregated. I mean, all through my childhood, long after Jim Crow was supposed to not be in existence, it was still a very segregated South.
I don't want anyone to walk through the world feeling invisible ever again.
In all my childhood, I never heard my grandparents say that anything shocked or surprised them. They knew what their country was capable of.
To me, elegy suggests that there is hope, and in some respects you've moved past the loss and are able to deal with it and to write about it.
I never know, when I start writing a story, what's going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out.
The epistolary form is one of the hardest to write. It's so hard to show something that's bigger in a letter. Plus, you have to have the balance of how many letters are going to work to tell the story and how few are going to make it fall apart.
When I'm feeling frustrated with a story, I have faith that it's going to come. Also, when I first started writing, I wanted to write the stories that were not in my childhood, to represent people who hadn't historically been represented in literature.
I'm usually working either on a picture book and a young adult book, or a middle grade book and a young adult book. When I get bored with one, I move to the other, and then I go back.
Until I was about 13, Manhattan had been a world seen from its edges.
Greenville, S.C., in the 1970s is a rolling green dream in my memory now.
My mother was a single mom whose days were spent as a customer service rep at Con Edison in downtown Brooklyn.
As a person of color, as a woman, as a body moving through this particular space in time, I realize the streets of New York tell the story of resistance, an African-American history of brilliance and beauty that, even in its most brutal moments, did not - could not - kill our resilient and powerful spirit.
For my family, 'black-ish' is the reward on a Thursday evening - a day after the show officially airs, when it's finally available to be streamed.
I would have written 'Brown Girl Dreaming' if no one had ever wanted to buy it, if it went nowhere but inside a desk drawer that my own children pulled out one day to find a tool for survival, a symbol of how strong we are and how much we've come through.
When I was a child, we never began a meal without prayer. We thanked God for the food, for each other.
Who are you without your girls? I truly believe that. Who are you without the people who help you make sense of the misogyny, the racism, the economic struggle, all of it? You need those people saying you're a good mom, a great writer. You're a great dresser. You cook well. Whatever the beauty is that you need to hear.