Jacqueline Woodson
I am still surprised when I walk into a bookstore and see my name on a book's binder.
Sometimes, when I'm sitting at my desk for long hours and nothing's coming to me, I remember my fifth-grade teacher, the way her eyes lit up when she said, 'This is really good.'
I'm inspired by questions I have that I try to figure out the answers to through my writing.
I think 'Miracle's Boys' made more people aware of my work.
I feel like I am walking in some amazing footsteps of writers who have come before me, like S.E. Hinton, Walter Dean Myers, Christopher Paul Curtis, Richard Peck and Kate DiCamillo, who I love.
Being a Witness was too closed an experience. That's what I walked away from, not the things I believe.
When I write, I don't think about messages for my readers.
I've wanted to be a writer since I was seven, but I didn't grow up in family where people aspired to live as writers.
I wrote all the time, and I had teachers who encouraged it.
I love playing with form. I love playing with sounds... I love music, and I love writing that has a musicality to it.
In writing 'Another Brooklyn,' I had to imagine what happens when friendships dissolve.
'Another Brooklyn' came to me in this kind of dreamlike series of vignettes.
I love how much love there is in the world of young adult and children's literature.
'Brown Girl Dreaming' was a book I had a lot of doubts about - mainly, would this story be meaningful to anyone besides me? My editor, Nancy Paulsen, kept assuring me, but there were moments when I was in a really sad place with the story for so many reasons. It wasn't an easy book to write - emotionally, physically, or creatively.
People want to know and understand each other across lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability.
Labeling is not the best way to get young people to deeply engage in reading.
Reading equals hope times change.
With my writing, I try to do stuff I have not done before. Each time I sit down, I want to have a new experience, and by extension, I want my readers to have a different experience.
I think people are willing to talk about anything if you come to it with kindness.
We, as adults, are the gatekeepers, and we have to check our own fears at the door because we want our children to be smarter than we are. We want them to be more fully human than we are.
In the family, writing wasn't anything anyone understood - being a writer in the real world? How could it be? We didn't have those mirrors.
When someone says to me, 'I love your book - I read it in a day,' I want to tell them to go back and read it again.
I think there is such a richness to the South and a lushness and a way of life.
I don't want my kids to have to walk through a world where they have to constantly explain who they are and who their family is.
Even after Jim Crow was supposed to not be a part of the South anymore, there were still ways in which you couldn't get away from it. And I think once I got to Brooklyn, there was this freedom we had.
I think when I was a young person, there was just kind of - there was very little dialogue about it. And there was just kind of one way to be gay, right? You saw very effeminate guys. You saw very butch women. And there was no kind of in-between. And there was no - you know, there wasn't anything in the media. There wasn't anything on television.
To be poet laureate is to try to spread the love and the accessibility of poetry to young people.
I'm fascinated by adult women who don't have close friends and how that could come to be. I think when you're a kid, the relationships are so intimate, and you're so connected to your girls, so what becomes of them? What could possibly happen to have you become an adult woman and no longer have that?
My mom was a big fan of Al Green... James Brown we weren't allowed to listen to, so of course I knew James Brown.
The conscious imprinting that happens between, say, 10 and 16 is huge. I think it's so important for me as a writer to stay open to the memories of that period because they were so formative.
Both racism and homophobia come from a sense of the presumed and the unknown.
I think there is much more queer visibility than there was when I was a kid. There is marriage, more trans visibility, and many more celebrities who are open about the sexuality. This was so not the case when I was a kid.
I think, as a kid, turning on the television and seeing that everyone seemed to be wealthy and white made me feel like an outsider, lesser than. I was not wealthy. I was not white.
I think, even though homophobia still exists, there is much more of a dialogue and a taboo around being homophobic.
The civil rights movement was about access to public space. We had to fight for public space.
When I was a kid, I got in trouble for lying a lot, and I had a teacher say, 'Instead of lying, write it down, because if you write it down, it's not a lie anymore; it's fiction.'
I feel like once I say out loud, to the public, what I'm working on, it's never going to be an actual book. So until it's close to done, I keep pretty quiet about my next stuff!
I love writing for young people. It's the literature that was most important to me, the stories that shaped me and informed my own journey as a writer.
I didn't know how many independent bookstores had amazing wine lists until I toured with 'Another Brooklyn.'
I don't believe there are 'struggling' readers, 'advanced' readers, or 'non' readers.
In young adult novels and children's books, you stay in moment. The story goes through a school year or a weekend. You never get a sense of a future self because the young person has not lived that yet.
I rewrite a lot until I get the rhythm and story right on the page.
Everything I write, I read aloud. It has to sound a certain way and look a certain way on page.
I have a short attention span, so when one book isn't working out, I just work on another.
I read a lot of the books that I love again and again and again and try to understand how the writer did it.
I still love Carson McCullers and Raymond Carver and Toni Morrison and James Baldwin.
Each book I write is a shout into the silence and a prayer and a plea for change.
I think that's important: to know 'the other,' as a means of coming to understanding.
In the daytime, I was expected to be the straight-A student. I was expected to be college bound. I was expected to be a great big sister. And then at night, I was just a club kid.